The White Rose and the Red Flame
by MateriaHunterYuffie
Summary: During a private game at Yuffie's 18th birthday party, Yuffie and Nanaki find their relationship suddenly and permanently altered, a change that will soon permanently affect every aspect of their lives... (Yuffie/Nanaki bestiality)
1. Yuffie's Birthday Party

Wutai's trees were filled with beautiful autumn foliage, and the whole country had turned out to celebrate Yuffie's eighteenth birthday. Everything was decked out with so many streamers and banners that the whole town resembled an over-iced birthday cake. In all honesty, Yuffie found it a bit annoying, but she didn't want to say anything. After all, these people would be her subjects when her dad eventually stepped down, and she did want them to like her.

There was a massive feast for the whole country at midday, but the table where Yuffie sat was reserved for her foreign friends, the ones who had fought beside her two years ago, in the battle against Sephiroth and Jenova. As the feast was winding down, Yuffie looked at her friends eagerly. "So who's up for a game later this afternoon?"

"What kind of game?" Tifa asked.

"It's this super-special game we only get to play on special occasions like this one," Yuffie explained. "It's sort of a combat simulation. We all put on special combat clothes so we're hard to see, and go out into the wilderness and hunt each other. Whoever can tear off their opponents' headbands without losing their own wins!"

"Not interested," Cloud said, shaking his head. "I spent enough time chasing you around two years ago."

"That's not a very nice thing to say," Yuffie growled at him. How could he bring that up on her birthday, of all times?! Wasn't there any expiration date on stupid stunts? She'd just been a kid back then…

"I believe I will pass," Vincent said. "It is not a guarantee that I could hold back my more…bestial side in such a game. I would not want to be responsible for any unpleasant accidents."

"Uh, yeah…that would be bad," Yuffie agreed, looking a little intimidated.

Tifa, Barret, Cid and Reeve all also declined the honor of participating.

"You guys suck!" Yuffie shouted at them. "What are you, scared?!"

"I'll do it with you!" Red XIII offered. "It sounds like fun!"

"Finally! Gawd, I'm glad at least _one_ of you has some sense!" she exclaimed. Of course, she had known she could count on Red—he was always on her side!—but it annoyed her that not one of her other friends had been willing to play the most awesome game ever.

They waited about an hour after the meal was over, then Yuffie went back to her room and changed into the special combat gear. It was mottled in the same colors as the autumn foliage, and fitted tightly to her body, so tight that she was actually a little embarrassed as she stepped out of the room in it. Every line and crease beneath the skin-tight suit was outlined perfectly, and she was terrified that the chill in the air might make her nipples harden. Bad enough that she couldn't wear any undergarments under those clothes because they were going to show…

But at least Red was the one guy she knew who _wouldn't_ make any lewd comments about the strangely revealing nature of her all-covering garb. Indeed, the only thing he said as she stepped out in front of him was to comment on how the outfit was even masking her scent a little, which would make the game that much more challenging!

"Okay, follow me," Yuffie said, then ran out of town as fast as she could. She didn't want anyone seeing her in that get-up who didn't have to. Once they were out of town, Yuffie led him towards the ancient shrine that was at the center of the game. "This is the old temple to Leviathan," she explained as they arrived at the derelict structure. "It's as old as the Da-Chao. We don't worship here anymore, but the grounds are still sacred, and no one's allowed into the woods behind the temple except during this game and a few other special rituals. It's sort of a rite of passage for young warriors going from boys to men. Er, girls to women, in my case," she added, with a nervous laugh. In truth, girls in Wutai did not usually partake in this particular ritual, which was why she had asked her friends to be her opponents, instead of any of the other people from Wutai, because she was pretty sure they would all have refused.

"So if you win, you'll be recognized as an adult warrior," Red concluded, nodding his head. "I went through something similar myself," he added, gesturing with his head towards the tribal markings on his haunches. "These were the proof of my success."

"It's not quite like that," Yuffie said, shaking her head. "I don't have to win to be recognized. Though it'll sure look better if I win! But I don't want you goin' easy on me, either!" she added hastily. "A fake win's worse than a loss."

"I agree," Red said, nodding. "I'll do my best to defeat you! What are the rules?"

"Well, we both have to wear these," Yuffie said, untying two thin blue streamers from one of the branches of a tree near the temple ruins. "Whoever gets their opponent's headband off wins. There aren't really any rules other than no magic and no trying to hurt your opponent. Pretty much everything goes other than that. It's more about stealth and tracking than combat, really."

Red looked puzzled as Yuffie started tying the streamer around her forehead. "It seems that starting out in the same place would make it more about combat, though…"

"Oh, no, we split up before the game starts!" Yuffie assured him, then knelt down in front of him, awkwardly aware of the fact that by now her nipples were fully hard…and right in front of Red's one good eye as she tried to find a place to tie the headband. "Where the heck am I gonna put this thing?!" she finally cried out in irritation.

"Ah…that's a good question," Red agreed. "If it is truly about stealth, would it be better to have it around my tail?" he suggested.

"I dunno…wouldn't that make it too easy for me?"

"There aren't many other good places to tie it, though," Red pointed out. "Not that I want a ribbon tied around my tail, but…"

"It's not a ribbon," Yuffie assured him, even as she moved around behind him to tie it onto his tail as he had suggested. "It's a ceremonial headband. Totally different from a silly old ribbon."

Red nodded, but didn't look entirely comforted. However, Yuffie couldn't think of anything else to say to placate his delicate ego, and instead headed over to the ruined structure itself. There was a massive bronze bell, and beside it, a ceremonial font filled with clean, pure water that constantly bubbled up from a natural spring. At the base of the font, a bucket and a small bottle of liquid soap and some other cleaning supplies were waiting, placed there earlier this morning by Yuffie herself, just in case. However, she certainly didn't need them at the moment! She dipped her hands in the ceremonial font, then placed them on the bell.

"I'm going to ring this bell, and as soon as it sounds, we both take off running in opposite directions. It'll keep sounding for about five minutes. As soon as it falls quiet, then the game is on," she told Red. "Ready?"

"Got it!" he agreed, nodding, with a fire in his eye as well as on his tail. "This is going to be fun!" he added, his voice sounding as youthful as he was for his species, a surprisingly uncommon occurrence.

"All right, here we go!" Yuffie exclaimed, then gave the bell a huge shove. It tilted far to the side, then began slowly swinging back towards her. As soon as its clapper hit the other side of the bell with a thunderous clang, Yuffie turned and started sprinting away into the forest, as did Red.

This was a game she was determined to win at all costs!

After entering the forest, Yuffie quickly leapt up into the tree tops and changed the direction of her traveling. "Good luck tracking me up here," she giggled to herself.

Soon, the bell fell silent, and Yuffie froze in the tree top, listening intently. However, she heard nothing. That was one reason she had wanted to play this game against her human friends; they would have made lots of noise with their big clunky boots in that forest. Red, on the other hand, was naturally well adapted to moving silently through the foliage, which was definitely a point in his advantage.

But Yuffie wasn't the greatest ninja in Wutai for nothing! She could move just as silently as a cat when she wanted to! Although it was more difficult to do so when moving from tree to tree, unfortunately. In fact, it was probably impossible, Yuffie realized with a grimace. Admittedly, she hadn't been making much more noise than a quiet autumn breeze, but it had been enough to cause Red to come running in her direction.

Yuffie moved a little higher up the tree, and clung to the trunk itself, placing it in between herself and her furry opponent. Soon, she could hear his breathing, and the quiet rustling of the flame on the tip of his tail as well as the nearly silent steps of his padded feet. As he stopped walking, his breathing took on an irregular pace. Was he sniffing the air, looking for her scent? She half wanted to accuse him of cheating, but since he couldn't climb the tree after her, she thought that might seem just a little hypocritical.

Apparently, her combat clothes really _did_ mask her scent, because Red was soon padding away again. Yuffie slowly, carefully glanced in his direction, and saw his form receding away from her. This was going to be her best chance!

After a moment to steel herself, she let go of the tree, and kicked off its trunk, turning her body so that she could land in a full run, dashing towards him. Even as she reached out for the headband tied to his tail, Red started to contort his own body, leaping into the air and reaching for the whirling tails of her headband with his teeth.

Both of them missed their mark, and fell back away from each other. They started strafing in a circle, neither one taking their gaze off the other for a second…until Yuffie missed a step, and started tumbling backwards down a steep hill.

"Yuffie!"

Red charged after her, but he didn't seem interested in her headband any longer, rather he seemed to be worried about her safety. Yuffie knew, even as she tumbled downwards, head-over-heels, that she wasn't in any danger, because there was nothing but an empty field at the bottom of the hill, but she was touched by the worry in Red's voice as he followed her downhill.

In fact, she was so touched that she decided it wouldn't be very nice to pluck the headband off his tail while he was worried about her, so she resisted the urge, and leapt to her feet as soon as she had stopped falling. "The game's still on!" she shouted, backing away from him.

"Right!" Red leapt into the air, snapping at her headband from the front instead of aiming at its loose tails, the way he had earlier.

Yuffie dodged out of the way of his teeth, and grabbed the end of his headband as he passed. The loose knot gave way, and the headband was left in Yuffie's hand as Red sailed onwards into a deep mud puddle.

"I win!" Yuffie exclaimed, turning to look at her suddenly very muddy friend. "Ah! Sorry!" she added, fighting not to laugh, but he looked so silly covered in all that mud that it was incredibly hard to keep from laughing.

"Where did that come from…?" Red asked, struggling back out of the mud.

"There's a spring over there," Yuffie explained, tugging on his front legs to help him out. "It makes it really muddy down here. C'mon, I'll clean you off back at the temple."

"That's why there was a bucket there…?" Red asked as they headed back up the hill.

"Yeah. I figured there was a chance someone might end up covered in mud. Glad it's not me, though," she added, chuckling. "I used to get in a lot of trouble for playing in that mud. It's sort of sacred mud…or something. I dunno. I never really paid much attention to all that religious talk."

Red nodded, and they walked on in silence. Once they were back at the temple, Yuffie replaced both headbands on the tree she had taken them from, then filled the bucket with water from the font, and squirted some soap onto a bristly brush and a washcloth. She quickly used the washcloth to clean off his face and throat, then set it aside and picked up the brush.

"Tell me if I start doing this too hard, all right?" she asked, then started brushing Red down, scrubbing the mud out of his fur. She started on one side, then did his back, and then the other side as well. All the while, Red didn't say a word, though he did make some little sub-vocal noises that Yuffie didn't quite understand. They didn't seem to be complaints of any kind, though, so she tried not to pay any attention to them. Once she was done with his other side, she rinsed the brush off, then looked back at Red. "Lie down on your back or your side, okay? I gotta clean your belly now."

"Er…is that really necessary?" Red asked uncomfortably.

"Of course it is! Don't be stupid! Now lie down!"

Swallowing heavily, Red did as he was told, and laid down on his side, though with his back facing Yuffie. She grimaced, picked up the brush, and moved around to face his exposed belly. However, she was surprised to see something pinkish and decidedly not muddy there…and she turned rather red as she realized what it was. "It's just the pressure, the friction," Red said in an embarrassed tone.

"Y-yeah…like a cat, right?" Yuffie said, realizing that she felt a little nervous in the face of Red's surprisingly large erection. She'd never even thought about him as having that kind of equipment before… "All those cats the lady downstairs has…sometimes if you brush one of 'em long enough, they get…um…like that…"

"Y-yes, that's right…" Red answered, but he sounded every bit as nervous as Yuffie was.

However, there was nothing for it! His stomach was still covered in mud, and Yuffie knew she was going to be in big trouble if he went back to town with that 'sacred' mud on his belly. All the more so if he still had an erection…

So Yuffie started brushing down his belly the way she had brushed down his sides and back. At first, she tried not to look at his erection, but every time her hands brushed against it, she couldn't help but look at it, and the longer she looked at it, the harder it was to look away again. It was almost as long as her forearm, and nearly as thick around as her wrist. She tried _very_ hard not to imagine the size of the opening it was intended for, or what it might feel like if he tried to put into a smaller one…but it was hard _not_ to imagine it…

Once his belly was clean, Yuffie fetched the bottle of soap and the bucket of water, and knelt down again. Red couldn't possibly go back to town with that huge thing waggling along beneath him, after all…

"I better check that you're all clean," Yuffie said, then squirted some of the soap onto her hands. Gently, gingerly, almost fearfully, she slid her hands underneath the engorged member that seemed to be aiming itself directly at her.

Red let out a gasp, but didn't say anything, so Yuffie started sliding her hands up and down along the length of his erection. Her hands were quite slippery, thanks to the soap, so they slid easily, and the lubricated member felt quite pleasant to the skin of her fingers and palms. It was a little more pliant than she had expected, and she was surprised to notice bumps and slight depressions along its surface. She could also feel throbbing, rope-like veins, and she found herself tempted to play with them, tightening her grip on top of them and feeling the blood within the veins fighting to get past her hands.

"Y-Yuffie…" Red started to object, but he didn't seem able to produce any other words, only moans. His eye slid shut as Yuffie started pumping her hands along his erection more quickly.

As she continued the pumping motions with her hands, she found herself noticing that his phallus seemed to continue for a short ways beyond what was exposed and pink; there was a furry 'sheath' that led up to his balls, which she thought seemed larger than they usually did. In fact, she had rarely ever noticed them before, but now they seemed so large that she couldn't believe she could ever have _failed_ to notice them. All the more so they way they were wobbling from side to side as Red's back legs started to twitch.

As Yuffie increased the speed of her hands, one of Red's front legs suddenly pressed down on her belly, and the other against her back, as if he was holding her in place, almost as if he was trying to ensure that she didn't stop, no matter what.

Not that she had any intention of stopping! She was actually quite enjoying giving him a hand job, and though she didn't want to admit it, even to herself, it was turning her on a little as well.

Soon Red began to make little rumbling noises in his throat. For a moment, Yuffie mistook them for growls, but she soon realized that they were more akin to purring than growling. Smiling, she began pumping her hands even faster. Red's front paw moved upwards from her belly to her breasts, and Yuffie felt something twitch between her legs as he clumsily pawed at her tender breasts through the exceedingly thin cloth of her skin-tight outfit. She wasn't sure if she was disappointed or relieved that his paw had moved up instead of down…

It was not much longer before Red let out a particularly loud moan, heralding an explosive burst of liquid from the tip of his erection. The liquid blasted all over Yuffie's chest and belly even as she released his softening member.

"Oh gross," she said, trying to wipe it off. "I wasn't thinking about _that_…"

"S-sorry," Red said, sounding exceptionally sheepish. He quickly rolled off his side and got to his feet, moving away from her, even as his now limp phallus began to retreat back into its sheath.

"It's okay…" Yuffie said, then dumped the bucket of water onto herself. The cold water completely dampened any arousal she had felt, but more importantly it washed off enough of Red's semen that she didn't think anyone would ever guess it had been there in the first place. Anyone who saw her all wet like that would just assume that _she_ was the one who had taken the tumble into the mud.

For a few minutes, Yuffie just sat there shivering in the puddle of water and semen, while Red sat behind her, with his back to her. Neither of them spoke, but Yuffie could feel the heat of his flaming tail every time it twitched in her direction.

Finally, she got to her feet and collected her cleaning supplies. "Okay, we better go back to town before people come looking for us."

"Oh! R-right!" Red exclaimed, jumping slightly.

"Uh…Red…let's just…let's just pretend this didn't happen, okay?" Yuffie asked. "I mean…you know…the uh…um…what happened while I was cleaning you off…" she went on, finding herself surprisingly timid about speaking of what had just happened.

"That…that's probably for the best," Red agreed, but was it Yuffie's imagination that he sounded a little sad?

As he preceded her down the path back to Wutai, Yuffie felt that there was something almost forlorn about the way Red was walking…


	2. The Day After

The day after Yuffie's birthday was a national holiday in Wutai. It had been ever since she was born, and would continue to be one until she had a child of her own; then the national holiday would be the day after _her_ child's birthday. It was rather a stupid tradition, but it meant more parties, so she had rarely complained before.

This time, however, she didn't really feel like partying.

She had won the ritual combat contest, but…afterwards…she had trouble looking Red in the eye now. How was she supposed to treat him now that she had touched him like that? It would be weird enough if she had found herself giving a hand job to a human friend, but to a friend who wasn't even human? Suddenly, she didn't know how to act around him.

All the more awkward was the fact that he didn't seem to want to leave her alone for a second. At every event, there he was beside her. And yet, he didn't seem able to talk to _her_, either, so he was just following her around silently, like a forlorn, lovesick puppy.

Fortunately, their friends had all left Wutai while Yuffie and Red were taking part in the contest, so there was no one to witness their sudden awkwardness who knew how wrong it was. Red had been Yuffie's closest friend the whole time they had been traveling together two years ago, and they had always been able to talk openly and easily about everything and anything.

Before.

But now…?

By the time the evening meal was approaching, Yuffie was nearly in tears from worrying about it. Had she ruined their friendship by doing that? She hadn't really meant anything by it! It was just…she'd never seen one before, not even a human's…and it had been lying there all interesting and tempting and…how could she have resisted playing with it a little? She hadn't really even thought of it as anything sexual…at first…

Yuffie was torn out of her worries by a sudden voice at her door behind her. "Yuffie?" It was Red! "Can I come in?"

"Um…okay…" Yuffie answered, her heart suddenly beating faster. What if…what if he expected something? Did he think she was his girlfriend now? Did he want to mount her? What would she do if he did? And…what if he didn't?

Red walked into the room, his ears drooping slightly, and sat down in front of her, but he couldn't lift his head to look at her. "Yuffie…um…I…I haven't…I haven't been able to…to stop thinking about what happened yesterday…" he said slowly, with several nervous pauses and false starts.

"Red…" was all Yuffie could manage to say. She wasn't sure what she wanted to hear. She wasn't sure what would be worse to hear.

"I…I'd really…I think…if we could…" Red shook his head, perhaps trying to order his obviously muddled thoughts. "In this situation…if I was human…we would…probably go on a date…right?"

"Probably…" Yuffie agreed, though she wasn't quite sure it was really that simple. It would depend on the human…

"So…I thought…maybe…we could do that anyway?" Red asked, finally looking up at her, with a hopeful look in his eye, though his ears still drooped in a sad manner.

"I guess…that makes sense…?" Yuffie answered timidly.

"Maybe tonight?" Red asked, more eager, more hopeful, his ears starting to perk up.

"I can't tonight," Yuffie told him, shaking her head. "I have to go to all sorts of functions tonight. I should already be changing into my formal kimono, in fact…"

"Oh…" Red answered, his head falling and his ears drooping dramatically. Seeing him look so sad made something twitch inside her, and she found herself fighting the urge to go hug him.

"You could come with me, though," she told him. "We couldn't call it a date, but you could think of it like one. If you want."

Red nodded eagerly, with a boyish glee in his eye. Yuffie had to fight the urge to laugh. Was he always so easy to please? Hastily, she explained the night's schedule of events—a formal dinner, a performance of a traditional play, and an out of season fireworks display—and arranged for Red to come back to pick her up for their 'date' in half an hour, so she would have plenty of time to change. He left with a prancing gait that Yuffie had never seen him display before…

Yuffie had barely finished getting into her elaborate kimono by the time Red returned. She hated wearing it, but tonight was for the elders of Wutai, and they expected formality in everything. Yuffie _hated_ formality.

As they were approaching the pavilion where the dinner was to be held, Yuffie quickly told Red not to let anything that was about to happen insult him, because the elders were all old and tended to speak their minds, especially when the thing on their mind was insulting. And sure enough, the first old man who came near them took one look at Red and said "What is that, Miss Yuffie?"

Yuffie grimaced. "This is R—Nanaki, a warrior of Cosmo Canyon, and one of my companions from two years ago."

"Has he always looked like that?"

"I was once much smaller," Red told the elder, in a wry tone of voice, "but I grew."

Yuffie _tried_ not to laugh, but she couldn't help it, and soon was guffawing away. That made the old man snort derisively and walk away. "Oh, man, Red, that was too good!" she said, when she finally managed to stop laughing. "I'm gonna be gettin' hell for that for months," she added, shaking her head, "but it was totally worth it. That guy's such a prick!" Her own choice of insult suddenly reminded her of what had passed between her and Red the previous day, and she fell silent, blushing intensely.

After that, Yuffie and Red passed most of the dinner in relative silence, having been returned to the awkwardness that had plagued them all day. However, sometime between the main course and the dessert, their usual comfort began to return to them, and by the time they went to take their seats for the play, they were chatting away as if everything was normal.

The play was exceptionally boring, and Yuffie kept dozing off. In fact, she fell so soundly asleep against Red's side that she didn't wake up until the first of the fireworks exploded in the night sky above them.

"Ahhh! I'm up, I'm up!" she shouted, leaping to her feet. "Where's the enemy?!" she added blearily.

"Those are just fireworks," Red reminded her in a gently laughing tone.

"Oh…right…" Yuffie laughed nervously. "That was stupid of me…"

"No…I thought it was cute," Red said, though he then looked away immediately, and Yuffie wouldn't have been surprised if he was blushing underneath his fur. The idea of a blushing Red was quite adorable…

"So…everyone's gone to watch the fireworks without me?" Yuffie asked, looking around. The seating area for the play and the stage were both completely deserted.

"They didn't want to wake you," Red said, nodding. "They thought you were still tired from the exertion of the contest yesterday…" he added, his voice twitching slightly.

"Oh…y-yeah…" Yuffie paused, feeling uncertain about what to do next. She was torn between what she knew was the right thing to do, what she thought was the best thing to do for her friendship, and what a deep part of her desperately wanted her to do. "Y'wanna find someplace to watch the fireworks?" she asked.

"I think the others headed that way," Red said, gesturing towards the open plains to the south.

"Yeah, but I know a better place," Yuffie told him. "Unless you don't wanna be alone with me…?"

"No! I'd love that!" Red exclaimed, so eagerly that he immediately shrank back again, his ears drooping. "Unless you'd rather join the others…"

"Those old killjoys? No way! C'mon, follow me," Yuffie said, then headed off in the direction of the Da-Chao. She wasn't sure which path was the right one, but where she was going, all three would still be open to her.

At the base of the Da-Chao, Yuffie turned and took a narrow side path, rather than climbing the statues. Red padded along silently behind her as Yuffie squeezed through a narrow passageway that led behind the cliff, to a tiny beach, the only one on the entire northern side of the island. "This is sort of my private beach," she told him. "No one else knows it's here."

Red nodded, then looked around. "It's lovely, but…we can't see the fireworks at all from here."

"Yeah, I know," Yuffie agreed, sitting down on the sand, ignoring the objections she could imagine the old ladies in town would have if they saw her sitting on the beach in her best kimono. "Fireworks are overrated anyway."

Red nodded, and padded up beside her. "Then…you wanted to be alone with me?" he asked eagerly, sitting down next to her.

"Don't—don't misunderstand!" Yuffie said, shaking her head feverishly. "I haven't…I haven't decided to do anything or anything!" She sighed deeply. "It's just…you know…there are a lot of things I'm expected to do now that I'm a woman instead of just a girl…"

"I don't understand."

"My dad and the elders…they're gonna expect me to get married soon. So I can give birth to an heir who'll rule after me," she explained glumly, staring out at the sea in front of her. "I don't wanna, but…"

"You—you can't!" Red objected, an earnest pain in his voice. "You can't just…you can't just marry some human male and….and…."

"Red…"

"Yuffie, I…um…I really…you're really…important to me…" Red said awkwardly. "I just never really thought about it until yesterday…I never thought about the _way_ you're important to me…about…what I wanted…"

Yuffie sighed sadly, and leaned back against the sandy beach. "I don't know what to do," she admitted. "I totally don't want to enter into a political marriage, but it's what everyone expects. And…I don't know how many guys would want to marry me for any other reason…"

"I would!" Red said, jumping to his feet and walking over to look down at her face. "If I was a human…I…I'd marry you…I'd've already married you…"

Yuffie smiled sadly, and leaned forward to hug his neck. "I know, Red," she assured him. "But you're not."

"And I guess you can't marry someone who isn't human," he concluded glumly, his voice barely more than a growl in her ear.

"I don't think my dad would want a furry son-in-law," Yuffie agreed, "and I kinda doubt I could have your kids."

"No, probably not," Red sighed sadly. He pulled out of her hug and looked her in the face, his one yellow eye staring into both of her moist brown eyes. "But does that mean that we can never…that what happened yesterday can never happen again?"

Yuffie bit her lip. "I'm not sure," she admitted. "I don't even know what I want, much less what I should do." That wasn't entirely true. She knew that what she should do, as far as her duty to her people went, was to turn her back on Red as a lover and go marry whatever political scion her father might choose for her. But there were a lot of other shades of 'should' that weren't so harsh…

"Well…will you…will you at least…at least let me…ah…repay you…for yesterday?" Red asked, stuttering in an adorable way that made Yuffie's heart flutter.

She blushed, but somehow it felt like she was blushing more because she knew she should than because she was embarrassed. After all…wasn't that the real reason, deep down, that she had chosen to bring him to this secluded spot? No matter how she wanted to deny it, she had to admit that she was harboring new and covetous feelings towards her four-legged friend and his tantalizing equipment…

Yuffie nodded, then got to her feet, and untied her obi. Carefully, she removed her kimono—it was so much faster to remove than to put on!—folded it, and set it on a dry and relatively clean rock at the edge of the beach. Then she laid back down in the sand. "Just…just a little, okay?" she said, more because she wasn't sure how much she could take and still give him up than for any other reason.

Red nodded, and walked over to her. For a moment or two, he just stood there above her, looking over her naked body, as if he wanted to memorize it. Just as Yuffie started squirming uneasily, feeling teased as well as embarrassed, Red lowered his head towards her, and began to sniff at her, drinking in her smell as if it were the bouquet of a glass of wine.

"S-stop that!" Yuffie finally objected. "It's weirding me out!"

Without saying a word, Red started licking her body. He began with her breasts, running his tongue over them slowly, swirling it across her hard nipples, eliciting quiet inhalations of pleasure from Yuffie. His tongue was quite large—it seemed too long to ever fit inside his face!—and though it was covered with very large bumps, like a cat's, it was almost as soft as a dog's, and every bit as flexible. The sensation of it caressing her breasts was almost electrifying, and yet Yuffie found herself quivering more out of anticipation than pure physical pleasure.

If his tongue felt that good on her breasts, how was it going to feel when he finally moved it towards more sensitive places?

Yuffie didn't have to wait long to find out. Whether he could sense her desire or just because he was eager to move forward, soon enough Red had stopped licking her breasts, and had walked around to stand between her spread legs. He lowered his face between her thighs and started licking. At first, he kept his tongue entirely outside her, sliding it across her lower lips, and using it to excite her clitoris. It felt wonderful, but Yuffie somehow couldn't find the words to say so, and could only sigh with pleasure.

After a few minutes, Red gently nudged aside her labial lips and slipped his tongue inside her. Yuffie moaned at the feeling of his huge tongue filling her interior, and as it began to slip around, sliding up and down, side to side, she finally was able to speak just a little, though only to moan his name.

As if her single word had encouraged him, Red began to lap away faster, lifting his head slightly so that his cold, wet nose began to jostle her clitoris with every slight motion of his head or her hips. Despite the coldness of his nose, the sensation was the purest form of pleasure, and every contact between his nose and her clitoris made her twitch. "Oh…gawd…." Yuffie moaned, digging her hands into the sand beside her hips, "…so….gooood…."

Red continued licking away, his tongue brushing away at Yuffie's hymen, softening it, gently poking holes in it and pushing it aside. She didn't know how long he had spent licking her that way before she felt something spasm inside her, and she cried out in pure pleasure, gasping desperately for breath as Red removed his tongue.

Yuffie was still lying there gasping, trying to recover from her first ever orgasm, as Red walked up directly above her. "Yuffie…" he said gently, "…may I?"

He didn't need to say any more than that. She knew what he wanted, and she knew that she wanted it, too. She nodded, smiling, and Red lowered his face towards hers, licking her gratefully, before beginning to lower his body down towards hers.

Trying to help as best she could, Yuffie turned her abdomen, trying to tilt the opening upwards. Still, Red's erection seemed to be finding nothing but the sides of her thighs and the space above her belly, so she reached down and gently took hold of the tip. It felt even larger than it had yesterday, hotter, too, and seemed to throb almost audibly. Carefully, Yuffie guided Red's erection inside her body.

Once the tip was inside, he needed no further help, and with one thrust of his hips, he had filled her entirely. Yuffie cried out, partially in pain, but mostly in pleasure. She had never even imagined having anything so huge inside her, but it felt surprisingly good. "Are you all right?" Red asked uneasily.

"I'm fine," Yuffie assured him. "It feels wonderful."

Red needed no further reassurance, and began to thrust repeatedly with his hips, drawing them back only a little ways before thrusting them forwards again. Yuffie moaned at the sensation, wrapping first her arms, and then her legs as well around his furry torso. With her legs holding tightly around him, Red's access to her vagina was even more perfect, and he began to thrust faster, a piston-like motion that set Yuffie to gasping for breath.

Even as she felt herself beginning to climax again, she wondered if human men were even capable of thrusting so quickly and forcefully. She didn't think human women were built to withstand the pleasure of it, but as her back arched convulsively, pressing her breasts up against her lover's fur, she didn't care; she didn't care even if the pleasure was so great that it burst her heart! Anything was worth it, as long as she could enjoy this feeling a little while longer!

Yuffie's orgasm had done nothing to slow down Red's piston-like thrusting, and he continued filling her with his engorged member, moaning softly in pleasure as he did so. As Yuffie's second—third, if you counted the one before he mounted her—orgasm approached, she was surprised to realize that Red was now thrusting even more quickly than before. She could do nothing but scream in pleasure, grabbing hold of his mane with the fingers of both her hands.

As her muscles clamped down on him, Red's thrusts became faster but also less deep; he was not pulling out as far before thrusting back in again. Even as Yuffie's orgasm began to wane, she suddenly realized that he, too, was having his orgasm, as the explosive burst she had witnessed yesterday was now released inside her, gushing up against parts of her body so deep that even his massive erection hadn't been able to reach them.

As Red's body slowly relaxed, and he began to pull out of her again, Yuffie imagined that she could feel his semen flowing up her fallopian tubes towards her ovaries, and she wondered, idly, if there was any way that she could possibly get pregnant. It didn't seem likely, but then again how likely was it that a lion-like being could have a flame on the tip of his tail instead of a tuft of hair?

Now that his softening phallus was outside of Yuffie's body again, Red slumped down to rest directly on top of her, his head on her shoulder, his breathing every bit as heavy as hers. What would she do if she _was_ pregnant? Would it even be a bad thing? She would certainly prefer Red as a husband to any of the young men of the noble houses of Wutai. And there was absolutely no way that any human man could ever match the sexual prowess he had just displayed!

And that had only been their first time…

…what was the second time going to be like?

[If you have read this far, please go to my profile and answer my poll about the story; I have been wondering if it needs a particular and massive edit.]


	3. The Cosmic Scale

In the week that followed Yuffie's birthday, she and Red were inseparable. He accompanied her everywhere, and of course they spent their nights together, joined in physical and emotional bliss. However, at the end of that week, Yuffie was surprised to be summoned by her father, who scowled at her as she and Red entered his room in his large house.

"I need to talk to you in _private_, Yuffie," he told her sternly, glaring down at Red.

"I'll wait outside, then, shall I?" Red suggested.

"Yeah, thanks," Yuffie agreed, then watched as her furry lover slowly left the room and ambled down the hallway towards the front door of the house. "That was totally rude, Dad," she said, turning to look at her father again. "Why do you gotta be such a jerk to my friends?"

"Yuffie, do you have any idea what kind of rumors have been spreading in the past few days?" her father replied, frowning at her. "That creature following you everywhere you go…"

"He's not a 'creature'!" Yuffie shouted angrily. "He's my best friend, and his name's Nanaki!"

"I don't care what his name is!" her father retorted, shouting just as loudly as she had been. "It's not normal! If any of your human friends was spending that much time with you…surely you can imagine the kinds of things people would think? Especially since rumor would have it that he's even sleeping at your house."

Yuffie laughed nervously. She had been very careful to be quiet while they were making love in her house, but…being confronted like this…what if she let something slip? "C'mon, Dad, you're totally overreacting…"

"You just tell that beast to keep his distance from you," her father said, shaking his head. "I don't want you causing such stupid gossip."

"Well, I don't want to listen to you insulting my friends," she snapped angrily. "If you're gonna be like that, I'll just go somewhere else!" she added, before storming out of the house. It was probably best to get out of Wutai for a while anyway. Less chance of being discovered if she wasn't at home, right? At least, there was less chance of being discovered by her father, anyway, and that was what mattered.

Once Yuffie was outside the house, she found Red waiting for her. "Is everything all right?" he asked, sounding worried. "You smell agitated."

"My dad's being more of a dork than usual," she said, shaking her head. "So we're gonna split for a while."

"Okay…?" Red agreed, in a tone of confusion, even as he ran to keep up with Yuffie as she headed out of town. As they walked southwards across the plains towards the beach, Yuffie explained exactly what her father had been so upset about. "I suppose I can understand what he means," Red said, nodding sadly. "I suppose maybe I _have_ been a little overeager in keeping company with you, but…I've never…I never even imagined I might ever get to feel like this! I didn't want anything to come between us…"

"I don't want anything to come between us, either," Yuffie agreed. "That's why we're getting out of town until the heat blows over."

As they continued their journey southward, they discussed their immediate plans, and decided to make for Cosmo Canyon, at least for a little while. After that was agreed upon, their conversation drifted to other subjects. They discussed how annoying an overprotective father could be, how awful it was when people judged others based only on their appearance, and how much more fun the world would be if people didn't care so much about things like nationality and race. Of course, they also talked about materia, which monsters were the most fun to fight, and naturally they spent a great deal of time talking about making love.

They were fortunate, when they arrived at the beach, to find a small fishing boat there. The fisherman—a resident of Rocket Town—was glad to give them a ride with him when he went back home, since they were friends of 'the Captain.' Given that fact, Yuffie and Red felt like they had no choice but to stop by Cid's house to say hello, but fortunately he was out of town, and Shera had no idea when he might be back. Though she offered to let them stay the night in the guest bedrooms, they declined, preferring to take a room at the inn instead.

The inn wasn't much more private than Cid and Shera's place would have been, but at least they didn't have to worry about being overheard by someone they knew. Though Shera was probably the least likely of all their friends to judge them for their unconventional romance…it was still best not to push things.

After their night in Rocket Town, Red and Yuffie continued on foot towards Cosmo Canyon, spending several nights camped out, making love under the stars and the full moon. When they finally arrived at their destination, everyone in town was overjoyed to see Red again, as he had not been spending as much time at home since the defeat of Sephiroth as he had prior to his abduction by the Turks. The people of Cosmo Canyon even seemed happy to see Yuffie, despite that she was usually the least popular of their group of companions.

After the greetings and welcome backs were finally over with, Red eagerly led Yuffie to his room. It was an octagonal room, lined with low trunks. Large, slightly dirty pillows rested everywhere, and a few of Red's discarded weapons littered the floor, much like the way Yuffie's old shuriken were everywhere in her own room. Tattered, striped banners lined the walls, and hung down in odd places in the middle of the room, giving it a primitive, tribal feel. But there was one thing that Yuffie noticed right away that really upset her:

"There's no door!" she exclaimed, staring at the open doorway in shock.

"I can't really open doors very well," Red pointed out, with a weak laugh. "No opposable thumbs," he added, displaying one paw. "But I do this sometimes," he went on, before grabbing one of the wall-hangings with his teeth and sliding it over to block the doorway. "I do that sometimes when I'm grooming myself, so people won't walk in on me."

"Y-yeah, but…that's not…gonna muffle the sound any," Yuffie pointed out. Or the smell, she thought, but she couldn't quite bring herself to say that part. She was sometimes surprised at just how powerful the sexual odors she and her furry lover generated really were. It had to be even worse for Red, of course, given his strong sense of smell. But maybe that was why he was so easily aroused? The scents clinging to Yuffie probably excited him all too easily. Maybe she needed to be bathing three or four times a day…

"Oh, don't worry about that!" Red assured her, in an eager tone of voice that told Yuffie he was already getting an anticipatory erection. "My room's isolated, and no one comes up here much anyway! It's safe, really! I promise!"

Yuffie knelt down, and looked her lover in his one good eye. "What am I gonna do with you?" she asked. "You're even hornier than I am."

"W-well…I'm still…just a teenager…for my species," Red pointed out, nervously.

"Yeah, and there's supposed to be nothing hornier than a teenage boy, huh?" Yuffie laughed. "Well, we can't let you walk around town like that," said, glancing at his erect phallus, "so I guess there's no helping it," she concluded with a laugh, even as she started pulling her shirt off.

"I love you, Yuffie!" Red assured her, just before he started licking her newly exposed breasts.

Still, Yuffie was a little worried about the lack of privacy, and she found herself holding back from calling out in pleasure as they made love. She was being even more quiet than she had been at home in Wutai, in fact, and Red commented on that sadly after they were done making love, assuring her that it really wasn't necessary.

"Sorry," Yuffie said uncomfortably. "I guess I'm just a little nervous. The idea of someone just walking in on us…it's pretty scary."

"Why? Are you ashamed of me?" Red asked, his ears drooping sadly.

"No, of course not!" Yuffie assured him, planting a quick kiss on his nose. "It's just human nature! No girl wants someone walking in on her while she's being intimate with her boyfriend! For that matter, no girl wants someone walking in on her while she's naked, period."

Red assured her that she'd see soon that no one in Cosmo Canyon would ever pry into their affair, and licked her cheek gently, which Yuffie did find very reassuring. Despite that, though, she was still a bit nervous, and wanted to put her clothes back on right away. She took advantage of the nearby bath house—which she had never known was there before!—then rejoined Red in his room for a brief nap.

When they awoke, they went down to the pub to have something to eat, and then Red led Yuffie up to his grandfather's old study. "What are we doing here?" she asked, looking around at the slightly dusty rooms. She wasn't sure which surprised her more, that Red wanted to come here, or that no one had moved Bugenhagen's things out of his house in the two years since he died.

"This way," Red urged her, rather than answering her properly. Yuffie didn't mind blindly following him, though, and soon they were in the lower level of the planetarium. Once they were both on the platform, Red activated the machine, and it raised up into the holographic projection of the solar system and its surrounding area. "I like to come here sometimes to think," Red explained to her, as he sat down and stared up at the rotating planets. "It helps me to keep things in perspective."

Yuffie smiled, sitting down on the platform beside him. "It's so pretty," she said, watching the dizzying pace of a passing comet, "but it makes me feel so small," she added, a bit more sadly.

"That's just it," Red replied, turning his head to look at her. "After everything that's happened, with the Shinra, Sephiroth, Jenova, geostigma and the Sephiroth-remnants…it's so easy to mistake our role in the universe. We've done a lot for the people of this Planet…it's easy to let that go to our heads and make us think we're somehow important. But when I come up here and see this…then I remember that I'm just another insignificant speck."

"Well, you're _my_ insignificant speck!" Yuffie reminded him, hugging him tightly. "So that means you _are_ important!"

"That's not what I meant," he said, with a slight waver to his voice that Yuffie recognized as his equivalent of blushing. "It's just that compared to all this, compared to the life of a planet or a solar system, the life of an individual, even one with my lifespan, is just the blink of an eye. No matter how important we might seem to other people or to ourselves, in the grand scheme of things, we're incapable of true importance, because we're too impermanent."

"Wow, Red…that's really deep…" Yuffie said, but she wasn't nearly as awed as she sounded. Rather, she was trying to sound awed so she wouldn't sound worried. She had tried her hardest, in the weeks since her birthday, to avoid thinking about their age difference, and the life span difference that accompanied it. As an ordinary human being, Yuffie couldn't expect to live much past 90, maybe to 100 if she was really lucky. How long would Red be forced to endure on after her death…? "Hey…Red…?" she asked, after a pause in which her heart began to thump so hard that it shook her whole chest. "How long are you going to live, anyway? If…if 48 is like 15, then…you'll live to be about 300?" she asked, doing her best to extrapolate from what little information she had.

But Red shook his head. "No, my species lives much longer than that," he told her. "My parents were both well over 500 when they died, and they were still in their primes. I don't know if our aging slows as we mature, or if it is just that our mental aging proceeds at a different rate than a human's. Honestly, I didn't know myself what the human equivalent of my age was until Grandfather told Cloud that I was only 15 or 16. I knew I wasn't an adult, but…"

Yuffie bit her lip, fighting not to cry. Red had been so passionate, so enthusiastic, ever since they had gotten involved. Was he going to have to suffer on alone for so many centuries without her? Would he forget her in time? Would he find other women to love? She didn't like _that_ idea any better than the idea of him pining away for her for centuries after her death.

"I wish I could expand my lifetime to match yours," she said sadly.

"I do, too," Red said, sighing. "I don't want to lose you." After a moment of silence, he lowered himself from a seated position to one lying down, with his head directly on the floor of the platform. It was a position that always looked so depressed to Yuffie… "If I could, I'd give up my lifespan and become a human so I wouldn't have to lose you."

"Don't say that!" Yuffie exclaimed, leaning down to hug him again. "You're the last of your species! If you somehow became human, then your race would go extinct!"

"It will anyway," Red pointed out glumly, turning his head to look at her. "Even if I found a female of my species somehow…how could I leave you to mate with a perfect stranger?"

Yuffie sighed, lying down on her back beside him, looking up at the planets and stars projected above them. "You wouldn't have to do that, you know," she told him. "Humans can have babies by artificial insemination, so I'm sure your kind could, too, if you could find a female."

"I might have difficulty explaining why I needed to," he pointed out.

"Yeah, that's true," Yuffie agreed, "but…well, it's sort of silly to argue about it, since the chances of finding one are pretty much nil."

"You're right," Red sighed sadly, and they fell into silence, the only sound in the room being the gentle hum of the projector, and the soft thumping sound of Red's tail as it slowly swung from side to side. Yuffie could feel it colliding with her legs every so often, the flame on its tip almost unbearably hot, and yet not quite unbearable enough to be truly painful. No matter how many times the flame connected with her skin, though, it never burned her; Red had told her years ago that that was part of its magic, that it was incapable of causing harm unless he willed it to do so.

"D'you suppose there's life on other planets?" Yuffie asked, after they had been lying silently under the projection for quite a long time. The whirling orbs seemed to beckon her in a mocking way, promising her that if she could only reach them, then nothing would ever separate her from her lover.

"Probably," Red answered, though he sounded confused. "The basic chemical compounds aren't that rare, and if you take the theory of Planetary Life into consideration, then there almost has to be."

"If Planets are alive," Yuffie asked, tilting her head to look at him, "then do they reproduce? Do two Planets get together and have little baby Planets?"

Red laughed. "If they do, I hope no one's living on them at the time!"

Yuffie laughed, too. "Oh, gross, I hadn't thought about it like that! I didn't mean one Planet humping another, I just meant, you know, are there a set number of them, or can the number increase?"

"I don't know," Red admitted. "Maybe Grandfather would have had an answer for that, but…most likely he didn't know, either. Maybe he knows now that he's returned to the Planet, but I don't see any way we could ask him now."

"Y-yeah…that would be kinda creepy," Yuffie agreed.

"I would think that there's some way for new Planets to be born, though," Red answered, after a lengthy pause. "Life is not something to be held back so easily."

"Yeah, that's true."

"Love shouldn't be, either," he added, in that shy tone he sometimes used, a tone that set Yuffie's insides quivering with both pure feelings of adoration and impure feelings of lust. "That…that was actually why I wanted to show you this," Red went on. "Since we're so insignificant in the grand scheme of things…I thought it was a waste of our time to worry about what other people think of our love. Since our time together is so brief, and everyone we've ever met is just as insignificant as we are."

"Oh, Red, you're just too sweet, you know that?" Yuffie cried, rolling over onto her side so that she could hug him. "I love you so much!" she added, pressing her face up against his side, and listening to the warm pounding of his heartbeat. "I'll do my best not to care what other people think, I promise!"

Yuffie held true to her word, and by the time she had been living with him in Cosmo Canyon for a few months, she no longer held back her exclamations of joy as they made love. The people of Cosmo Canyon seemed to be aware of their relationship—though no one had ever actually come out and said so—but they also seemed to support it wholeheartedly. Yuffie wasn't sure if that was because they were less judgmental than the rest of the world, or if that was just because they were so protective of 'their' Nanaki that they didn't care what he did as long as it made him happy.

The only thing that really mattered to her was that they didn't care about their cross-species romance, and so she didn't have to hold anything back.

Though they traveled around a bit, for the most part they stayed in Cosmo Canyon, because whenever they traveled it was so hard for them to get a hotel room. Either the management would mistake Nanaki for Yuffie's pet, an all too common and excessively uncomfortable mistake, or they would realize that he was a sentient individual and would start giving them very suspicious glances when they wanted to share a single bedroom.

But that wasn't too much of a problem, because despite the lack of a door, Nanaki's room was still the most pleasant place for the two of them to make love. There was a thick carpet on the floor that was very comfortable beneath Yuffie's hands and knees, the massive pillows were thick and soft, and the trunks along the side of the room were just the right height so that if Yuffie laid down on them, Nanaki could stand above her, his back feet on the floor and his front feet beside her shoulders, and be at just the right height to make love to her without the awkward pose and risk of crushing her that had accompanied their first love-making.

Lying on the trunks was Yuffie's favorite position, but Nanaki preferred it when Yuffie was on all fours on the floor. They sometimes had brief spats arguing about which position to use, but always made up quickly and passionately. They had their worst spat ever about six months after Yuffie came to live with Nanaki. Yuffie had said that being on her hands and knees was degrading, and that he was trying to rob her of her humanity, and Nanaki had countered that she was trying to turn him into a human by always forcing him to stand above her while she was on her back. The spat had lasted almost ten minutes, it was so severe, but the end of the quarrel was predictable enough…

"I'm sorry," Nanaki said, as he returned to the room, his ears drooping sheepishly. "I shouldn't have gotten so upset. After all…I…I did offer once…to become human if I could…"

Yuffie shook her head. "No, it's my fault," she insisted. "I'd gladly become one of your species if it meant you'd never have to deal with the pain of being left alone. I shouldn't have complained." She knelt down in the center of the room as Nanaki walked up to her. Once he was seated in front of her, Yuffie leaned forward and wrapped her arms around him. "You can always take me in any position you want," she whispered in his ear. "Next time I start acting so selfish, you just remind me that I promised I'd always belong to you."

"I will, Yuffie," Nanaki assured her, even as she could feel his erection beginning to press up against her knees. "And if I start being unreasonable, you can remind me that I promised _I_'d always belong to _you_."

Smiling, Yuffie released her lover, so that she could pull her top off. As soon as she'd gotten her bra out of the way, Nanaki began to lick her breasts, his thick tongue caressing the tender nipples that had been aching for his touch for the last hour or so. Moaning with pleasure, Yuffie quickly pulled off her shorts and panties, tossing them aside.

Even before Yuffie could say anything, Nanaki had shifted his attentions, and had begun licking her newly exposed private parts, every touch of his tongue against her clitoris sending shivers of ecstasy through her body. She couldn't take much of that without needing more, though, and soon she pushed his head aside and got into the position he had requested before they began their quarrel, on her hands and knees, aiming her backside in his direction.

Eagerly, Nanaki began to lick her again, flirtingly inserting his tongue just a little bit before slipping it out again. Yuffie moaned delightedly, then shook her head. "No, I need you inside me," she told him. "Right now!"

Nanaki apparently felt the same way, because he was assuming the position within seconds. He reared up a little and set his front paws on her shoulder blades, then walked forwards with his rear legs, until the tip of his phallus began to slip inside her. He took a few more steps, then thrust his hips forward, joining their bodies completely.

Yuffie cried out in delight, feeling an orgasm overtake her in her joy at being united with her lover again after their quarrel. Nanaki lowered his upper torso a bit, shifting his weight off her shoulder blades, and letting the entirety of his lower forelegs rest on her back, with his forepaws dangling over the front of her shoulders. It was still a fair amount of weight for Yuffie to bear, but not nearly as much as it had been when he had been using just his paws, and certainly not enough to in any way reduce the pleasure she was feeling.

Nanaki began to thrust inside her rhythmically, setting her to moaning passionately. "Oh, Red…" Yuffie sighed dreamily. No matter how many times they made love, she never tired of the feeling of his enormous member filling her, and every time felt just as amazingly wonderful as that first time on the beach had. No, it felt even better, because that first time she had been unsure and despite her desires had even felt a little afraid. But now she knew that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him, no matter what anyone else had to say on the subject, and that made the feeling of his erection sliding in and out of her body even more wonderful.

"Red…oh…tell me that you love me," Yuffie moaned, as she felt her body beginning to tense up with another approaching orgasm. "Tell me that you'll never leave me!" she added, almost desperately.

Suddenly, Nanaki's thrusts stopped entirely. He was still buried inside her, and the sensation of penetration without motion was an entirely new one to Yuffie, pleasant yet also teasing. "Yuffie," he said, sounding a little exasperated, "this requires a lot of effort. I don't have enough breath in me to mate with you and talk at the same time."

"Oh," Yuffie said, feeling sheepish. "Sorry. You can tell me afterwards, then."

"I will," he promised, then renewed his piston-like thrusting with even more vigor than before.

The thrill of it was almost too much for Yuffie, and she began screaming in pleasure as she orgasmed. Nanaki's thrusts sped up even more, and soon she could feel the flood of his orgasm joining her own continuing orgasm. She had just barely finished screaming in ecstasy when she became faintly aware of fast-approaching footsteps in the hallway.

Nanaki was still above her, still coupled with her, when the tapestry blocking the doorway was thrust aside and Vincent ran in, his triple-barreled gun already in his hand. "I heard screams—" he started to exclaim, then stopped suddenly. Without a word, he turned, holstered his gun, and hurriedly left the room.

"Oh gawd…" Yuffie said, even as Nanaki slowly dismounted from her back. "If he tells anyone…"

"Does it really matter?" Nanaki asked, watching as Yuffie hurriedly put on her shirt and shorts.

"It might!" she exclaimed, then ran out of the room. She had to chase Vincent quite a long distance down the hallway before she finally caught up to him.

"I'm sorry," he said, unable to look at her as she stood there panting to catch her breath. It hadn't really occurred to Yuffie that trying to run full tilt immediately after sex might be a bit difficult. The fact that she hadn't bothered to put her underwear back on wasn't really making things any easier, either. "I misunderstood what I was hearing," he went on uncomfortably.

"Yeah, I got that," Yuffie said. "But you better not tell anyone what you saw!" she added, pointing at him angrily. "I'll beat the crap outta you if you do!"

"I would not wish to admit to having witnessed such a thing," Vincent assured her.

"You better not," Yuffie muttered. "We don't want anyone finding out until we're ready," she added, not wanting him to misinterpret. "Most people are gonna be pretty stupid about it, so we have to break the news delicately."

"Of course," Vincent agreed. "Believe me, I won't tell anyone."

Yuffie was still a little leery of letting him off so easily, but…she wasn't sure what else to do or say, and honestly she felt a little uncomfortable being around him now that he had seen her not just naked but sexually entangled with her four-legged lover. Eventually, she decided to accept him at his word, and went back to Nanaki's room.

"I thought you said weren't ashamed of me," he said as she came back inside and replaced the tapestry over the door.

"You know that's not it, Red," Yuffie assured him, as she took her clothes back off again. "It's just…think about what people might say if he goes around blabbing?"

"That doesn't sound like something Vincent would do. Besides, I thought you weren't going to worry about what other people think," Nanaki reminded her.

"And I'm not! But…it's important for us to have our friends on our side when we go public," Yuffie said, lying back against one of the pillows. "Our lives are gonna be a lot happier if we don't have random people throwing things at us in the streets for being perverts or something."

"I suppose that's true," Nanaki agreed, curling up beside her. "But you know…I've been thinking lately," he said, even as he rested his head on her lap.

"About what?" Yuffie asked, when he didn't supply the rest. After all, it was nothing surprising for him to be thinking in general; Nanaki was one of the most thoughtful people she had ever met!

"About Grandfather, and about the people of Cosmo Canyon, and why no one here minds that we're in love," he said slowly. "I think…maybe Grandfather knew this would happen."

"He could tell we were gonna fall for each other?" Yuffie didn't really see any way for _that_ to be the case. Not unless that old guy had been psychic as well as all around weird.

"I don't know about that, exactly, but…when he was dying, Grandfather urged me to stay cheerful, because I might meet my life's mate someday." Nanaki sighed. "At the time, I thought he was trying to say that I wasn't really the last of my kind. But maybe he knew that love could blossom between me and a human woman…and maybe he had told the others here, too. Maybe that's why they're so accepting of us."

Yuffie sighed sadly, absently stroking his fur with one hand. "I'm glad they accept us, but…I wish they could _help_ us, too."

"Help?" Nanaki repeated, lifting his head to look at her curiously. "What do we need help with? Do you…do you think we're not mating correctly…?"

Yuffie laughed, and shook her head. "Nothing that feels _that_ good could be wrong!" she assured him. "I just meant…we could use some help figuring out how we're gonna make my dad accept us. And…I still…I want to be able to have your babies…somehow…"

Nanaki nodded. "Maybe there's a way."

"How?"

"I don't know," he admitted, shaking his head, "but that doesn't make it impossible. There are supposed to be some very clever scientists at the WRO. We could ask them if they could think of a way," he suggested.

Yuffie nodded thoughtfully. It might be the best idea…after all, even Vincent couldn't keep a secret forever, so they would have to go public relatively soon. But if they could go public _and_ declare that they had a way of having babies…it would seem more like love and less like perversion. Wouldn't it? After all, she didn't love him for the way his body shape was different from hers, and she didn't even love him for the enormous size of his erection; she loved him for being her best ever friend. The size of his equipment—and his skill at using it—was only a bonus, and the way his body didn't match hers was a _detraction_. But if she could have his babies, then at least that would be something that everyone would accept and understand. And she might be able to make up some nonsense about him being divine, or this being Leviathan's divine commandment, or some other bit of semi-religious rhetoric that her father and the other old farts of Wutai might accept…


	4. Changing Developments

Yuffie had never been to the WRO's headquarters before, and she had to admit that she didn't really like the place any. It wasn't that it was a particularly unpleasant building, just that it had absolutely no character whatsoever. Even the Shinra building had had more personality, even if it was an oppressive and evil personality.

But Reeve was happy to see her and Nanaki—though naturally he didn't understand the implications of them arriving together!—and he gave them the grand tour of the place personally, despite how busy he was running the whole show. After the tour was over, Nanaki was the one to say that he wanted to talk to someone scientific, someone who might be able to analyze a few aspects of his unusual biology.

"I suppose that can be arranged, but why now?" Reeve asked, looking at Nanaki curiously. "You're not sick, are you?"

"No, it's not a health concern," Nanaki assured him. "It's just…it's hard to explain. But I really do need to talk to someone."

"Y'know, now that he brings up the whole health issue, that's a good point," Yuffie added, looking down at her lover with concern. "What if you _did_ get sick?"

Nanaki nodded. "Yes, you're right. It would be best if someone could understand my body enough to diagnose unusual illnesses."

"Well, I can take you to—" Reeve started, then stopped again as one of the other people in the room cleared his throat. "Ah…I can send Cait Sith to take you to one of our labs," he said. "I do have work I have to attend to, unfortunately. Yuffie, would you like to visit the weapons testing range? You could practice against some of our combat drones. I know the development team would love to know how they fare against someone with your skills."

"Maybe later," Yuffie told him. "I thought I'd go with Red. I…uh…I'm worried about him, y'know? He's all alone in the world and everything!"

Reeve looked confused, but he nodded, and soon the two lovers were on their way, following Cait Sith through the halls of the WRO HQ. "What happened to your giant moogle-thing?" Yuffie asked it, since there was nothing else to talk about, and she didn't want to have to field any questions from the robotic cat about why she preferred to accompany Nanaki instead of going and enjoying herself fighting the combat drones.

"Och, it got destroyed, lassie, an' I cannae ge' another!" the robotic cat said, shaking its head sadly.

"That's a pity," Nanaki said, "but don't go expecting to ride _me_ into combat again. That was humiliating."

Cait Sith wailed something about cats needing to stick together in a dog-eat-dog world, which made Nanaki complain bitterly that he was nothing so simple as a 'cat.' They continued talking along those lines for most of the walk to the laboratory, but Yuffie found herself distracted by the basic point behind the argument. Just what kind of being _was_ Nanaki? He always objected greatly whenever he was described as either feline or canine, but what else was left? He actually seemed to embody some traits of both types of animal, but he also had traits shared by neither. It was definitely going to make it easier to force her father to accept him as a son-in-law if she could present him as being a member of some species or other. For that matter, why didn't he know the name of his own species?

Yuffie was still pondering that last point when they arrived at their destination, and Cait Sith walked over to a woman with red-blonde hair, wearing a lab coat slung across her shoulders, as if to ensure that no one could fail to notice her artificial arm. Yuffie was a little more hung up on the scanty and rather suggestive nature of the clothes under the lab coat than anything else about the woman, though.

"This's Dr. Shalua Rui," Cait Sith informed them. "Ye'll find she's the best we've got," it added, before introducing them in turn.

"And what do you want with me?" the woman asked, looking at Yuffie and Nanaki curiously.

"It's a bit complicated, Dr—" Nanaki started.

"You can just call me Shalua," she told him, smiling. "And I like complicated," she added, with a smile.

"Okay, wait a sec," Yuffie said, then nudged Cait Sith with her foot. "You scat out of here," she told it. "Reeve doesn't need to hear this."

"Aww, tha's nae fun at all!" Cait Sith complained, but eventually it accepted defeat and allowed Yuffie to usher it out of the door.

Once Yuffie had firmly closed the door behind the robotic cat, Nanaki nodded, and looked back at Shalua. "I'm the last of my species, as far as I know," he explained, "but I was wondering…well…if it was possible…for me to reproduce anyway."

"I don't see how it could be, unless you just want to clone yourself," Shalua answered, shaking her head. "Though honestly, cloning technology isn't really good enough for that yet."

Nanaki's ears drooped dejectedly, and he shook his head. "Maybe it's not a good reason to believe it's possible," he said, "but years ago, when I was captured by Hojo, he seemed to think he could mate me with a human and produce offspring."

Shalua's eyebrows lifted slightly, and Yuffie was suddenly struck by the oddity of the fact that in all this time, she had not opened one of her eyes. "With a human?" she repeated. "That doesn't seem very likely…"

"Well, not exactly a human," Yuffie said, shaking her head. "With the last of the Ancients."

"The Ancients were human," Shalua assured her. "I've seen their genetic profiles. The Cetra were a clan, not a species."

"I guess that makes sense," Yuffie agreed, nodding. She'd certainly never noticed anything physically different about her, after all…

"I thought maybe you could run some tests and see if it would really be possible," Nanaki continued, looking at Shalua pleadingly.

"I don't see how it could be, but it's certainly an intriguing problem!" Shalua said, smiling. "Do you mind if I take a sample of your blood for testing?"

"That's fine," Nanaki assured her.

Shalua began to withdraw equipment from the table behind her. "I must say, it's curious that Hojo would try something like that. He was insane, but he wasn't stupid. Usually, you wouldn't expect him to run a test of that magnitude without knowing it would work first." Having gotten all the equipment she needed, she turned, crouched down and began the process of drawing blood from Nanaki. "We did recently recover a large amount of data from the Shinra databases, and we've managed to decrypt most of it," she went on, as the vials of blood were filling, "but unless you know what project name it would be filed under, I don't know how long it would take to find any notes he might have had on the subject."

"He assigned me the specimen number of Red XIII," Nanaki informed her. "Is that helpful in any way?"

"Yes, that should help!" Shalua agreed, smiling, as she stood up again. "If I can access Hojo's files on that experiment, then I might be able to give you an answer quite quickly! Why don't you come back tomorrow morning, and I'll let you know if I've found out anything."

Nanaki nodded. "All right, we will. Thank you."

Yuffie and Nanaki left the laboratory, and after a quick detour to the cafeteria so that Nanaki could have something to eat in order to replenish the blood he had just lost, they decided to go to the weapons testing range after all, and try their hands against the combat drones.

The combat drones turned out to be rather pathetic, but at least fighting them was a distraction, and it passed most of the rest of the day. However, after dinner, they found themselves being led to two different rooms on the opposite sides of a crowded hallway. Unsure what else to do, Yuffie reluctantly entered the room assigned to her, but she already felt lonely at being parted from Nanaki.

As she waited for traffic in the hallway to die down a little due to the onset of night, Yuffie reflected that this was really the first time she and Nanaki had been apart for more than a few minutes since they first got involved six months ago. It made the emptiness of the sterile room feel even more lonely, but it also had to make her stop and think that maybe it wasn't such a good idea for them to be quite _that_ inseparable. After all, even if there was some way for her to have his babies, she would still die so much sooner than he would. If they spent every minute of their lives together, wouldn't that make her death even harder on him, when the time came?

Even worse, what if one of them died sooner than that, due to accident, disease or combat? Maybe, no matter what happened, they should try not to be quite so attached at the hip as they had been the last six months. They should try to find a more normal way to spend time together…shouldn't they?

What was a _normal_ way to spend time together, anyway?

Yuffie continued wondering about the nature of their relationship for most of the night, but every time she checked the hallway to see if she could sneak over to Nanaki's room, she found that there were _still_ people passing through the hall. Apparently the WRO headquarters was a building that didn't sleep.

Eventually, Yuffie had to give up and go to sleep alone in her bed.

She was woken the next morning by Nanaki calling her name from the hallway. Blearily, she got up and answered the door. "Good morning!" he said cheerfully. "Did you sleep well?"

"Not at all," Yuffie said, shaking her head. "I've gotten so used to sleeping beside you that I can't sleep without hearing the sound of your heartbeat."

"Me, too," Nanaki agreed, with a bit of chagrin. "I was hoping it was just me."

Yuffie smiled, and ruffled his mane. "At least you know I was thinking about you, right?"

He nodded. "And I was thinking about you, too, of course!"

"Of course!" Yuffie agreed. "Anyway, let's go get something to eat, and then see if that lady scientist found anything good."

Nanaki was delighted to comply with Yuffie's suggestion, and soon they were on their way to the cafeteria, where they were barely able to pay attention to their food, between their delight at being reunited and their curiosity about Shalua's findings. They were back at her lab within half an hour of rising, and Shalua looked at them with one eyebrow cocked.

"You're certainly eager, aren't you?" she chuckled.

"I-is there anything wrong with that?" Nanaki asked, his ears flattening back a little.

"Not at all," Shalua assured him. "And between your blood and Hojo's files, I learned quite a bit," she added.

"Cool!" Yuffie exclaimed excitedly. She was dying to find out if there really was any way for her to have her lover's children.

"Do you know the difference between animals and monsters?" Shalua asked, seemingly changing the subject.

"Well, monsters are uglier and meaner and…that's not what you mean, is it?" Yuffie asked, with a nervous laugh.

"I meant on a genetic level," Shalua replied. "Animals—and humans—have four base pairs, while monsters have six. By that definition, you qualify as a monster, rather than an animal," she told Nanaki.

"I'm…a monster…?"

Shalua laughed. "It's not as bad as you think. It's an archaic term that shouldn't be used anymore. Besides, chocobos have six base pairs, too, so it's not like they're universally more aggressive than their four base pair equivalents. The term really ought to be 'magical beings' or something, rather than the judgmental 'monster.' One of the main differences between so-called 'monsters' and their nearest 'non-monster' equivalents is usually the ability to use magic."

"But I can't use magic without using materia," Nanaki pointed out.

"And chocobos can't use magic at all!" Yuffie added.

"Oh, no, chocobos can use magic," Shalua assured her. "They have a special variant of the comet spell, and it's quite deadly. Only the wild ones use it, of course, and only if they're really pushed too far, but chocobos are actually quite potent magically. And I suspect that you most likely _can_ use magic without using materia, and that you simply don't know how," she added, looking down at Nanaki.

"But weren't the Ancients supposed to be able to use magic without materia?" Yuffie asked. "I thought that was what everyone said, but if they were human just like us, then…"

Shalua nodded. "That _is_ the rumor," she agreed. "Perhaps the magical/non-magical distinction is more complex in sentient beings. I'll have to look into that some time. However, for the moment, let's discuss this project I found in Hojo's files," she said, turning on a computer monitor. It showed a file with a picture of a four-legged being, but it wasn't Nanaki. "This is a cuahl," she said, indicating the picture. "Genetically and morphologically, they're the monster most similar to you," she told Nanaki.

"But those things are vicious brutes, nothing like Red!" Yuffie pointed out.

"Indeed, they're not sentient," Shalua agreed. "However, Hojo ran an interesting experiment with them some fifteen years ago. He had compared them genetically to a number of feline animals, and came up with a match. Cuahls, it turns out, have the same number of chromosomes as tigers. So Hojo tried to see what would happen if they mated. According to the file, it was difficult to get them to see each other as potential mates, and when they finally did, nothing happened, no offspring were produced. Then he treated the tigers with specially prepared cuahl DNA, and repeated the experiment. That time offspring _were_ produced. Viable offspring."

"What do you mean, 'viable'?" Yuffie asked.

"I mean, offspring capable of reproducing themselves," Shalua explained. "That's traditionally been one of the manners in which the species distinction has been tested. If two types of beings can and will produce viable offspring together, then they're the same species. If not, then they aren't. It's more complicated than that, of course, but in many ways that's what it boils down to."

"Then cuahls are the monsterification of tigers?" Yuffie concluded, feeling confused yet hopeful about where this was leading.

"Not exactly. The tigers treated with cuahl DNA went through some physical changes," Shalua explained, bringing up two photographs on the screen, one of a standard tiger, and the other of one with new, tentacle-like whiskers, like cuahls have, "but for the most part they remained tigers. Yet their offspring were unquestionably cuahls, not tigers. Although Hojo did call the results a new species which he dubbed 'torama', the only difference seems to be one of coat coloration."

Nanki cleared his throat. "Are you saying that because of that experiment, Hojo thought that I could reproduce with a human woman who had been treated with my DNA?"

"Exactly," Shalua agreed, nodding. "Like humans, you have 36 chromosomes. In theory, a human woman treated with your DNA should partially convert to your species, and should be able to bear your young. In theory."

"So…had he already injected her with your DNA?" Yuffie asked. "She didn't seem to have turned into anything…"

"The file contained no indications regarding whether or not Hojo had actually begun the experiment," Shalua answered, shrugging. "It only had a notation about the number of Nanaki's chromosomes, and a comment that it should be possible to mate him with a human, as it had been possible to mate cuahls and tigers, followed by a reference to that experiment by number."

"How long did it take the tigers to make their partial conversion to cuahls?" Nanaki asked.

"It took them about a month," Shalua answered. "However, tigers don't live as long as humans, so it's possible that it would take longer for a human."

"So she might have been in the process of converting when she was killed," Yuffie concluded. It was a disturbing revelation in a number of ways…

"It's also possible that it wouldn't work for humans," Shalua went on, shaking her head. "Tigers are already morphologically similar to cuahls, whereas humans share almost nothing with your species apart from basic mammallian morphological traits. Number of chromosomes aside, it might still be impossible."

"It's worth a try, though, don't you think?" Nanaki asked, looking up at Yuffie.

"Of course it is!" she replied.

"So you're the intended mother, then?" Shalua asked, looking at Yuffie curiously. "Of course, that's why you're involved in the discussion in the first place. And you made Cait Sith leave so that the Director wouldn't mistake your reasons for wanting to help reproduce this fellow's species."

"He…wouldn't have been misunderstanding…" Yuffie admitted, feeling a little embarrassed about it. But if she couldn't admit it to the woman who was about to make it possible for her to have Nanaki's babies, then how was she ever going to admit it to everyone else?!

Shalua's eyebrows lifted ever so slightly—though she _still_ didn't open her left eye!—and she tilted her head to the side just a little bit. "Intriguing," she said, sounding more impressed than anything else.

"Um…will it change anything else about me?" Yuffie asked.

Shalua shrugged, and she turned to her workstation. "I don't really know," she admitted, as she began to pour a red liquid—presumably Nanaki's blood?—into a test tube. "Since it isn't mentioned in the file as to whether or not Hojo had already injected the previous test subject, her lack of obvious transformation means nothing. Especially since he might have preferred to start with an untreated subject as a control experiment." She began slowly using an eyedropper to add other substances to the blood. "If it does indeed work, it might induce considerable changes, or it might only change your genetic structure, and leave your basic morphology untouched. And remember, it might not work at all."

Yuffie nodded sadly. She didn't want to think about that possibility. She wanted this to work. She _needed_ this to work. "If it does work…do you think it'll change my lifespan, too?"

Shalua chuckled as she used a syringe to withdraw the blood—or whatever it was—from the test tube. "You'd better hope it does," she said, turning to look at Yuffie. "According to Hojo's files, the gestation period for his species is about ten years," she said, indicating Nanaki with her artificial hand. "If you're able to bear his young but don't gain his lifespan, you'll spend an unpleasant amount of your life pregnant."

"Y-yeah…" Yuffie replied, suddenly a little afraid of the injection she was already receiving. "Red…is that true?"

"I don't know," he admitted. "I was the only survivor of my litter, and my parents had no cubs after us, so I don't know what the gestation period is. Given our lifespan, that sounds a bit too long, though. I wouldn't think it would be much more than two or three years."

"Th-that's not really all that much better," Yuffie answered. She hadn't liked the sound of 'litter,' either. She had naturally expected a single baby birth after a nine month pregnancy, like with ordinary human babies. Carrying around five or six babies for several years? That did _not_ sound like fun at all.

But it was too late now. Shalua had already completed the injection, and removed the syringe from her arm. "I think you should stick around the headquarters for a few days so I can run tests on you to make sure everything's going all right," she said. "If anything seems to be going amiss, we'll want to be able to try and reverse the process right away. But if you still seem healthy at the end of the first few days, then I think you can probably go home again, as long as you check back in with me regularly. And make sure to let me know if anything starts going wrong!"

Yuffie nodded, and thanked Shalua for her help, then she and Nanaki left the lab. It was still early in the morning, so they figured no one would think anything of it if they both went into Yuffie's room together.

Still feeling a little woozy from the sudden rush of information after it was too late, Yuffie flopped down on the bed. Nanaki jumped up beside her, and started licking her cheeks. "That…was a little too much, too fast…" Yuffie said, after a few minutes. "I feel like my brain's breaking trying to keep up with it."

"You're not happy?" Nanaki asked, sounding disappointed.

"It's not that," Yuffie assured him. "I really do want to have your babies. It's just…well…pregnancies that last several years? Lots of babies at once? I never thought about that angle of it, y'know?"

"Oh, yes, I suppose humans only litter two at a time, hmm?" Nanaki said, looking down at her breasts, and the hard nipples that were obvious through her little blue tank top. "That's why you only have two mammary glands, instead of six."

"No, we usually only have one at a time," Yuffie said, shaking her head. "I wonder why six is the default for four-legged animals? Seems like most of 'em have six. Cats, and dogs, and—wait! Do you think I'm gonna grow four more breasts?!"

Nanaki just stared at her for a moment. "I don't know," he admitted. "I'm not even sure if that would be good or bad."

"It would definitely be bad," Yuffie assured him. "I'd look like a freak!"

"You could never look like a freak to me," Nanaki told her, slipping one front paw between her thighs, and using it to gently caress her. "You'll always be wonderful in my eye."

"Oh, gawd, Red, you're so…perfect!" Yuffie exclaimed, sitting up slightly to kiss him, sliding her small tongue into his large mouth, and shutting her eyes delightedly as his large tongue began probing her own mouth in return.

Naturally, they could only spend so long kissing before wanting to move on to more passionate pastimes, but Yuffie found it frustrating that she was once again having to hold back on calling out in pleasure. How wonderful it would be once they could go public and never have to worry about being overheard ever again!


	5. Deep Changes

Yuffie and Nanaki returned home to Cosmo Canyon one week after Yuffie had been injected with Nanaki's treated DNA. Shalua had monitored Yuffie's condition very closely in that time, but had recorded such minimal changes that she was inclined to consider the experiment a probable failure. However, since Nanaki's treated DNA was still in Yuffie's bloodstream, she had thought it wouldn't be safe to risk a second injection, not while they still didn't know if the first one was going to cause any changes.

After three or four months, Yuffie began to realize that there _were_ changes going on in her body. Her menstrual cycle was beginning to slow down, and she could swear that her sense of smell was increasing in power, too. She was also craving meat more often, but tended to dismiss that as merely being Nanaki's continued influence on her subconscious mind more than any genetic change. The slowing of her cycle, however, seemed like a wonderful sign: surely it meant that not only was she changing as a result of the injection, but her lifespan might be expanding as well. Shalua came to visit them in Cosmo Canyon and ran a few tests, but they didn't prove anything terribly conclusive where lifespan was concerned, although she was at least able to confirm that some of Yuffie's DNA had begun to change from four base pairs to six. She left Cosmo Canyon with a stern reminder that Yuffie should contact her immediately if anything else seemed to change, especially anything that seemed detrimental.

It had been almost six months to the day since the injection that Yuffie and Nanaki returned to the WRO's headquarters. The place seemed to be in quite a tizzy, but Yuffie had other things on her mind as they headed to Shalua's lab. "This isn't really a good time," Shalua told her. "If this is just for a check-up, you should come back later."

"No, it's…I've been having some negative symptoms," Yuffie told her plaintively.

Shalua sighed, biting her lip. "All right, but I'll have to make this brief. What's the problem?"

"Well, I've been feeling dizzy lately," Yuffie started, then shook her head. "No, that's not quite right. I'm fine if I'm sitting, or even standing in place, but the least bit of motion and I'm all…out of whack. It's like I've got no control over my balance anymore."

"I see…any other symptoms?"

Yuffie nodded, blushing slightly. "I…my backside's been hurting lately," she admitted.

"It's been getting in the way when we try to make love," Nanaki added mournfully. "We've really had to go out of our way to keep it from hurting her."

"I didn't need quite that much information," Shalua said, after a lengthy pause. Then she shrugged slightly. "Come over here, and we'll try taking an X-ray, see if we can find the cause of the pains. The balance, however…I don't think I'll have time to deal with that right now."

Yuffie nodded, and followed Shalua over to a diagnostic device. "What's going on around here, anyway?" Yuffie asked, as Shalua began operating the machine.

"We've been having trouble with Deep Ground, an experimental branch of Shinra's military that recently re-emerged," Shalua told her. "They've been causing quite a lot of trouble." She shook her head, and looked away from the machine. "All right, it's scanned you now, so you can sit down if you'd like. It'll take a few minutes for me to get the results."

"I'll be more comfortable standing, actually," Yuffie said. It wasn't that the pain was directly on her seat—it was a bit higher than that—but whenever she sat down, her shorts pushed against the painful area, so she didn't generally like to sit down anymore unless she could take them off first.

Shalua didn't seem to be paying any further attention to Yuffie, though, and was focused intently on her machine. Yuffie walked over to Nanaki's side, and looked down at him. "Do you think this is something bad?" she asked uneasily.

"Let's hope not," he answered.

Before either of them could say anything else, however, Yuffie was surprised to hear her phone ring. Usually, everyone ignored her! Realizing that probably meant it was her father on the line, she took it out of her pocket warily, and answered it.

The conversation that followed stunned her to her core. Wutai had been attacked. Wutai had been attacked and she hadn't been there to defend it! She felt like she had failed both herself and her people.

Her father and the Wu-sheng had fought off their attackers—apparently those Deep Ground guys that Shalua had mentioned—but her father sounded like he was still out of breath. He had probably pushed himself way too hard. Yuffie's mind was flooded with a succession of horrible thoughts, questions that begged her for terrible answers.

What would have happened if her father had been hurt—or killed!—in that attack? What if he hadn't been able to fend them off? What if—

A sudden laugh from Shalua cut off Yuffie's thoughts. "Well, I think we've hit on the explanation for both your problems," she exclaimed. For a moment, Yuffie thought Shalua had something to say about the attack on Wutai, then she remembered the actual reason she was here. "Look at this," Shalua prompted, indicating a display screen in front of her.

Yuffie and Nanaki walked up beside Shalua and looked at the screen curiously. It showed, essentially, a cross-section of Yuffie's lower body, viewed from the side. There was a blocky outline where her shorts were, and a thinner one within it that outlined her lower back and buttocks, and within that her bones stood out thick and white. But something about her bones looked _wrong_. It looked like…

"Am I growing a _tail_?!" Yuffie shouted, looking at the protruding bone that was reaching to the upper edge of her buttocks.

"That would seem to be the case," Shalua said, nodding. "I wasn't expecting a change of that sort, I must admit. But it would explain your recent balance problems. Your body is undergoing a vast change, and your senses are not able to keep up with the change. Once the tail has fully emerged, then you should be able to regain your sense of balance, after a suitable adjustment period.

"I…I'm not so sure this is a good thing," Yuffie said, staring at the forming tail in concern.

"I think you'll look cute with a tail," Nanaki assured her.

"That's not really my worry," Yuffie told him. "People are really gonna react badly to a girl with a tail. Aren't they?"

"They might," Shalua agreed, "or they might not. They can be surprising sometimes."

Yuffie sighed. "I guess if things start getting too weird, I could always cut it off and claim it had been a fake…?"

"Probably," Shalua said, after a moment's pause, "but I wouldn't recommend it. Don't worry; once this Deep Ground matter is cleared up, I'll be able to give your changing condition my full attention. We'll figure out what's going on, and what can be done about it."

Yuffie nodded, but she couldn't quite answer. What was she supposed to say at a time like this? What was she supposed to think?

Running footsteps approached the lab, and the door opened to admit Reeve. He let out a sigh of relief. "Ah, it's true!" he exclaimed.

"What is?" Yuffie demanded. Were there rumors that she was growing a tail!? Could he see it already?! Or maybe he could see the read-out?!

"They told me you were here," Reeve said, hurrying over to Yuffie and Nanaki. "We could really use your help right now."

"Oh…of course," Yuffie said, glancing back over her shoulder. Thankfully, Shalua had turned off the display showing her fledgling tail. "But my dad might need me, too…"

"You'd be helping Wutai by helping us fight Deep Ground," Reeve pointed out.

"Oh! Right! What do you need?" Yuffie exclaimed. Anything to pay those jerks back for making her father fight at his advanced age! He had to be like fifty by now!

"I'm worried about Vincent," Reeve said, making Yuffie's stomach cramp up. Vincent…? She wasn't comfortable with the idea of being around him anymore, not since he had accidentally walked in on her and Nanaki at the tail end of making love. "He's gone back to Nibelheim to investigate there. Maybe you could go and help him out?"

"Er, maybe I should go," Nanaki suggested, no doubt aware of his lover's discomfort around Vincent in the last six months.

"I was hoping you could investigate in Edge for us," Reeve told him, shaking his head.

"In Edge?" Nanaki repeated. "Can't Cloud and Tifa do it?"

Reeve sighed sadly. "Cloud and Tifa are out of contact right now," he explained. "They left the children with Barret, closed up the bar and went on vacation a week ago. Since it was to be a…romantic interlude…they turned off their phones, so we can't get in touch with them. They wouldn't even tell us where they were going, to ensure that no one could spoil their time alone." He shrugged. "At least that means we know that they're presumably all right, but it also means that we have no one in Edge to investigate the disappearances."

"Disappearances?" Nanaki sounded very worried.

"Edge is completely deserted now," Reeve informed them. "We don't know what happened to its inhabitants. Vincent tried to investigate, but…"

"His inner beast emerged and left him incapacitated," Shalua finished. "If I hadn't been there…there could have been trouble."

"Inner beast?" Yuffie repeated. "What, that big hairy thing with the horns?" She presumed neither of his basically human alternate shapes would ever be referred to as an 'inner beast'…

"No, Chaos," Shalua informed her. "It seems to have a mind of its own, outside of Vincent's control."

Yuffie frowned. "That's creepy."

"He _did_ always dislike using it," Nanaki agreed. "But if Vincent couldn't learn anything in Edge, what makes you think I can?" he asked Reeve.

"Vincent was attacked by Deep Ground while he was in Edge," Reeve explained, "which certainly gives us the obvious answer as to who's behind the disappearances, but not any information regarding the location of the missing people. I dislike treating you as if you were a common dog, but with your advanced sense of smell, I thought you might be able to detect clues that even Vincent overlooked."

"Vincent's not likely to pay much attention to any clue not actively shooting at him," Yuffie said, shaking her head. "But don't go asking so much of Nanaki!" she added, perhaps a little jealously.

"It's all right, Yuffie," her lover assured her. "He's right; I might be able to find information that humans would overlook. And this will give me something to do while you're helping Vincent."

"Oh…right…" Yuffie answered uneasily. She _really_ didn't want to have to spend time with Vincent right now. She wasn't sure she could look him in the eyes anymore…

"The sooner you can depart for Nibelheim, the better," Reeve said. "We'll have someone fly you out there as soon as possible."

"Ugh…not more airships…" Yuffie moaned. Why was it always airships?

* * *

It had been a week since the defeat of Omega Weapon, but there was still no sign of Vincent. Of course, none of the old companions had doubts that he had survived the battle. Only that infuriating Shelke brat seemed to think there was any chance that Vincent could have been killed.

Yuffie knew it wasn't fair to hate someone she had only just met, but she was having trouble feeling anything other than hatred for Shelke. By her own selfish stupidity, she had gotten her own sister killed! That would have been bad by any standards, but worse still, the now deceased sister had been Shalua, the only one who understood the transformation Yuffie was undergoing, the only one who had seen the scientific data on the nature of Nanaki's species. Maybe it was selfish of Yuffie to be pained by Shalua's death more for her role as their gene-swap specialist than for her as a person, but…

Shelke entered Tifa's 7th Heaven Bar, which made Yuffie want to leave it again. All the more so since she knew that Nanaki was taking a nap on the bar's front porch. When Yuffie sat down beside her lover, he lifted his head to look at her. "Any news?" he asked.

"Not so far," Yuffie told him, shaking her head. "You know what Vincent's like. He's probably just hanging out somewhere feeling sorry for himself, like always. He never thinks about what other people might be thinking."

"Are you feeling any better today?" he asked, more quietly.

Yuffie sighed sadly. "Yes and no," she said. "The balance thing is getting worse," she admitted, though it had already been so bad that during the fight with Deep Ground she had suddenly taken a header off a building! Luckily, she hadn't been hurt—maybe her skull was getting thicker, too?—but she could easily have been _killed_. "But…I checked this morning in the bathroom, and…" Biting her lip, she stopped talking, and looked around. There was no one in the street, and everyone in the bar was on the far side of the room, so no one was likely to hear her. "The tip of my tail's actually through the skin now," she admitted. Thankfully, that had relieved a lot of the pain she had been in lately, but it brought up a world of new issues.

"I can't wait to see it," Nanaki said eagerly.

Yuffie smiled. She was eager, too, of course, as they hadn't been able to make love since they left Cosmo Canyon, but she was also worried. "We're going to have to tell at least our friends soon," she told him. "Especially with Shalua gone. We don't have anyone to turn to now if something goes wrong."

"There might be someone else at the WRO who would understand the transformation," Nanaki mused, "but we can't even ask unless at least Reeve knows what's going on."

"Exactly," Yuffie agreed. "More than that, I'm worried about Wutai, and my dad. I…I want us to start living in Wutai instead of Cosmo Canyon. So I can be there if anything else happens."

"So you want to use telling our friends as a practice run for telling Lord Godo," Nanaki chuckled. "I suppose that makes sense."

"Y-you should start calling him 'dad' too…" Yuffie told him, almost shyly. They had never actually discussed marriage, but…if she was going to make her father and the elders of Wutai accept Nanaki, then they would have to get married…

Nanaki looked at her for a moment, his eye surprisingly wide, then he shut it again, with one of his feline-like smiles. "Of course," he agreed, then lowered his head to rest on her lap.

They were still sitting there, with Nanaki resting his head on Yuffie's lap, when Shelke hurried out past them, wearing a little pink dress that Yuffie had never seen before. After watching the girl run down the street and disappear into the distance, the confused lovers got to their feet and went back into the bar.

"Where'd the brat go runnin' off to?" Yuffie asked.

"Don't call her that," Tifa said sternly. "She's just as old as you are."

Yuffie sighed. "Okay, fine, but where'd she go so suddenly?"

"She did appear to be in quite a hurry," Nanaki agreed. "It seemed most odd."

Tifa chuckled. "Well, it occurred to Cloud that Vincent might be in that cave where we found Lucrecia's body, and Shelke wanted to be the first one to see him. Ah…if you wanted to go, I'm sure you could catch up before the airship leaves…" she added, looking at Yuffie.

"Who, me? No way!" Yuffie shouted, shaking her head. "Airships _and_ submarines?! Never! Never, never, no way, never!"

Tifa laughed. "Of course…but you don't mind Shelke being the first one to see him?"

"Why would I?" Yuffie replied, completely flummoxed.

"Well…I thought…but maybe I was wrong," Tifa said, shaking her head. "In any case, we're going to hold the victory party as soon as everyone gets here. Do you want to help me in the kitchen, or let everyone know about the party?"

"Are those my only choices?" Yuffie asked, not liking either one.

"If you want to be helpful, yes," Tifa replied. "You could always go back out and sit on the porch and do nothing, if you want."

"No, I wanna be helpful, I just…well, I guess I can help out in the kitchen," Yuffie said, sighing. If nothing else, it would give her something else to think about other than getting nervous about the announcement they were about to make.

"I'll call everyone," Nanaki told Tifa. "Yuffie helped me set up my phone to accept voice commands, so it's not so hard for me to use it now."

Tifa smiled. "Thanks, Nanaki. That'll be a great help." With that, she headed into the kitchen.

Yuffie crouched down in front of Nanaki, and kissed his forehead briefly. "We're gonna make our announcement at the party, okay?"

"I was thinking the same thing," Nanaki agreed.

Yuffie smiled, and kissed his nose, then stood again, somewhat unsteadily, and followed Tifa into the kitchen. While they were preparing food for the party, Tifa told Yuffie how worried she was that Cloud was going to develop a new complex about everything that had happened in Edge while they were away on their vacation. After she had gone on about it great length, Yuffie put down the food she was working on, and bodily turned Tifa to look at her.

"You gotta put your foot down and tell him to stop bein' such a dork!" Yuffie exclaimed. "He's just one man; no one expects him to be guardian of the whole freakin' world." After the whole Omega Weapon thing, someone probably needed to tell Vincent the same thing, but it wasn't going to be Yuffie who told him. She was probably _never_ going to be at ease around him again, even after they made their announcement…

"I know that, but if we had been here…"

"You mighta been caught up in it and killed," Yuffie pointed out. "No matter how tough you are, if they surprise you while you're goin' at it, you're gonna be in trouble." Tifa turned bright red, but didn't seem able to answer, so Yuffie kept going. "You guys should go to Cosmo Canyon after the party," she suggested. "Nanaki can take you up to the old planetarium and explain a few things that might bring Cloud's neuroses into check a little."

Tifa looked confused, but agreed none the less, and they both went back to their activities of preparing for the party. Admittedly, Yuffie didn't know for certain that being reminded of his own insignificance in the grand scale of the universe would actually work for Cloud's reverse God complex, or whatever it was, but it was worth a try. After a little while, Nanaki came in to report that everyone was on their way. He stayed in the kitchen to keep them company, but he couldn't help out with the food preparations. Still, just having him there made Yuffie feel more comfortable, and more cheerful.

Soon enough, the others began to filter into the bar, and within a few hours, the party was underway. As everyone else was chattering away, getting hammered and generally enjoying themselves, Yuffie found herself just watching them, feeling somehow disjointed from the rest of the world. It hadn't been that much more than a year ago that everyone had been in Wutai for her birthday, but her entire world had been completely turned upside down and inside out since then. Admittedly, the transformation had been a good one—and was beginning to be a literal one!—but it seemed like such a huge development for such a short time. She wouldn't change a minute of it for anything, though!

Except that minute when Vincent walked in on them having sex. She'd change that one out gladly…

Eventually, as a lull came in the general partying, Nanaki nudged Yuffie's leg. She nodded, and hopped up onto one of the tables. "Hey, everyone, I got somethin' to tell you!" she announced. As they all turned to look at her, she took a hesitant step backwards, getting a little nervous again, and started to tumble over backwards.

Nanaki leapt up onto the table beside her and reared up onto his back legs, using his front legs to stabilize her. "Be careful!" he said urgently. "What if you fell?"

"Wouldn't be the first time," Shelke muttered with a cruel laugh.

"You shut it! This's got nothin' to do with you!" Yuffie snapped at her. "In fact, who invited you to listen in, anyway?!"

"Just get on it with it," Vincent told her, sounding annoyed. Of course, as the one person in the room who already knew what she was likely to say, Yuffie reflected that he probably had good reason to be annoyed.

"A-anyway, well…" Yuffie glanced down at her four-legged lover, who blinked his yellow eye slowly, an encouraging warmth hidden behind his iris. Yuffie smiled, and looked back out at their assembled friends. "This'll probably come as a shock to most of you, but…Nanaki and I are in love," she said, figuring there was nothing for it but to come out and tell the full truth.

"Just how much've you had to drink!?" Barret blurted out, staring at her with wide eyes.

"I'm not drunk!" Yuffie screamed. "I haven't had anything to drink!"

"This is something that has been growing between us for a long time," Nanaki confirmed. "In fact, though I didn't understand it at the time, I think this has probably been growing—at least within me—ever since we met."

"Aw…Nanaki…" Yuffie knelt down on the table and hugged his neck. "You're so wonderful!" she exclaimed, pressing her face up against the side of his.

Only when Reeve uncomfortably cleared his throat did Yuffie realize that it had been deadly silent in the bar for several minutes while she and Nanaki nuzzled each others' faces. "This is some kind of prank…isn't it?" Reeve asked nervously.

"It isn't," Vincent assured him.

Yuffie turned bright red, and leapt back to her feet, whirling around in Vincent's direction angrily. "You just keep your trap shut!" she shouted, though it turned into a screech as she lost her balance and started to pitch forwards.

Fortunately, Nanaki was ready, and caught the back of her shorts in his teeth, pulling her back onto her feet. "I think you ought to sit down again," he suggested.

"Y-yeah…" Yuffie agreed uneasily, then sat down on the table, dangling her feet over its front edge.

"When did you get so clumsy?" Cloud asked, peering at her in confusion. "I don't remember you flailing around like that three years ago."

"I'm not clumsy!" Yuffie defended herself vehemently. "I just lost my sense of balance, 'cause…well…" She sighed, shaking her head. "This is all out of order from the way I wanted to explain it, but…see…uh…it turns out there's a way for a human to have Nanaki's babies after all, but I hadda be injected with some of his DNA first, and…well…I'm kinda growing a tail now, and until I get used to it, I'm gonna be off balance all the time."

"It's likely to get worse before it gets better," Nanaki added, nodding. "You'll probably need to start walking as I do soon."

"Gawd, no!" Yuffie shouted, jumping back down off the table onto her unsteady feet. "I'd look like an idiot! I'll just use crutches or something!"

Suddenly Yuffie became aware of Tifa standing right behind her. "You're not really serious about this, are you?" Tifa asked. "You're really growing a tail?"

Yuffie nodded. "It's through the skin now and everything. You can look for yourself if you don't believe me."

For a moment, Tifa didn't react, then she gently pulled the waist band of Yuffie's shorts away from her back, and quickly gasped. "You really are!" she exclaimed in disbelief. "I'm glad it's not on fire like Nanaki's…"

"It probably will be once it's fully grown," Nanaki told her. "Though I guess we won't know until the time comes."

"What a shame," Cloud's voice suddenly said from right behind Yuffie. "You're ruining a pretty cute backside there."

"You pervert!" Yuffie shouted, whirling around and slugging him in the face before he could react. "What're you doin', lookin' inside my shorts?!"

"You said we could!" Cloud objected, rubbing his face sorely.

"She said _Tifa_ could look!" Nanaki growled jealously.

"Me, Tifa, what's the difference?"

"She's a girl, and you're a pervert!" Yuffie reminded him.

"But if you're not into human men, then what's it matter?" Cloud asked, sounding like he genuinely didn't understand. Just how dense was he?

"Just 'cause I happened to fall in love with a guy who isn't human doesn't mean I want ordinary guys scoping out my body!" Yuffie told him. "You just keep away from me!"

"Yes, stay _far_ away from her," Tifa added, a little jealously. "And you're not having anything more to drink tonight, either."

"I…but…" Cloud sighed, and shook his head, then headed over to take a seat near the bar. Apparently he knew better than to argue with Tifa.

Yuffie sighed, and sat down again. "Anyway, there's just one complication about this whole process I'm going through," she said.

"Just one?" Cid repeated, sounding like he might laugh. "You don't call growin' a damn tail a complication?"

"That's not what I meant by complication," Yuffie said, shaking her head. "I meant…well, it was Shalua who looked at Hojo's files and analyzed Nanaki's DNA. But now that she's gone…if anything goes wrong….I don't know what we'll do…"

The room was silent for several minutes. Despite the humor that her companions seemed to see in her romance, Yuffie was glad that they at least seemed to understand the danger of her transformation suddenly being without the scientific guidance that had begun it.

Then, to Yuffie's surprise, Vincent turned to look at Shelke. "Can you still access Lucrecia's memories?" he asked.

Shelke nodded. "Yes, but why would you ask that?"

"Her scientific knowledge should leave you in a position to understand the process," Vincent said solemnly. "She was far more capable than Hojo."

"Yes, but…" Shelke's voice trailed off, then she grimaced. "I guess I have no choice," she concluded glumly. "But I dislike taking part in such perversion."

"What could be perverted about wanting my species to continue?" Nanaki asked, sounded wounded.

"Unless you're planning on continuing the species by artificial insemination, it's perversion," Shelke replied in an authoritative voice.

Yuffie fought against the urge to upbraid the little girl for being such a small-minded bitch, but if she really was the only one left who could understand the transformation, then Yuffie didn't dare tick her off.

Nanaki sighed. "We'll probably face such a reaction from the world at large," he said sadly. "And I imagine your father will be even more upset."

"Yeah…I'm thinking of telling him that I transformed spontaneously, and that it was Leviathan's doing. If I could make him believe that, then it'd be like my divine duty to marry you, right?" Yuffie mused aloud.

"Would he believe that?" Nanaki asked curiously.

"Uh…no, probably not…but if I made the people believe it, then he'd have to pretend he believed it," Yuffie said, after a moment's thought. "And the people will swallow just about anything."

"If that's going to be your claim, then what are you going to do until your transformation is completed?" Vincent asked. "Being seen in a half-way state would nullify that story."

"And I thought you wanted to go back to Wutai right away," Nanaki pointed out. "To protect the place."

Yuffie pursed her lips. Why was life so complicated? "Well, as long as we pretend Shalua never gave me that injection, and that Leviathan's the one who's making me transform, then that should be good enough…I think…"

"That seems like a risky plan," Reeve said, shaking his head. "You should work out your story very carefully. The fewer holes that are left in it, the better chance you'll have in convincing your father and the people of Wutai to accept it."

"Well, will you help us?" Nanaki asked. "If you could help us come up with the best possible story…"

The others all looked at each other uncomfortably. Was it really that awful? Did they really think it was better to settle for less than love with the same species than to find true love with someone of another species? Or maybe they were just too cowardly or lazy to help determine a story that her stupid dad would accept, Yuffie reflected glumly.

Finally, though, Tifa smiled. "Of course we'll help you," she said cheerfully. "You're our friends, and we all want you both to be happy. Don't we?"

At Tifa's insistent prompt, the others all expressed their willingness to help, but none of them sounded all that convincing. Still, Yuffie was glad to have some help, even if most of it was given less than eagerly.

* * *

[Ugh, I suck at chapter titles. I hope the scene change wasn't too jarring. Both scenes seemed too short to post as their own chapters...]


	6. The Return Home

By the time Yuffie was ready to break the news to her father, she was having trouble finding any clothes she could wear over her now rapidly growing tail. It was over a foot long, and no matter what she wore, it showed. Eventually, she had to give up and cut a hole in the top of her shorts for it, wearing her moogle hood over the rest of her outfit to hide it as best she could. She didn't want the tail spoiling the story before she could tell it! At least it was long enough now that she had regained enough of her balance that she was once again able to walk without toppling over…as long as she was careful, anyway.

When she walked into her father's room with Nanaki by her side, Yuffie was acutely aware of the glare her father was aiming at Nanaki. "After all this time, you finally come home, and you're still being accompanied by that…_thing_?" her father said coldly.

"Yeah, I am, and don't call him a 'thing'!" Yuffie snapped.

"Take your hood off when you talk to me in my own home!" her father shouted, getting to his feet angrily.

Yuffie sighed, and moved the hood off her head, though she didn't remove the cloak it was attached to. "Look, dad, I've got something very important to tell you, and I don't want you to freak out, okay?"

"What could you possibly have to say that would make me 'freak out'?" he asked slowly.

"Well…it's like this. Nanaki here is the last of his species," she started out. She had planned this all out very carefully, but her plans had already been disrupted by her father's temper, as usual. "And Leviathan came to me in a dream, and told me that he didn't want such a noble race to go extinct." Her father's face contorted into a violent frown, but he didn't interrupt, so Yuffie continued. "He said that it was his divine will that I should help Nanaki to carry on his race."

"Do you expect me to believe such lies?!" her father bellowed, waving his arms angrily. "Do you dare to drag Leviathan's name through the mud in order to excuse some kind of sick perversion?!"

"I'm telling you, it's my sacred duty!" Yuffie shouted back, throwing off her cloak, revealing her tail, which was whipping around fairly quickly in her anger. Nanaki had warned her, of course, that he had no conscious control over his tail, apart from the ferocity of its flame, but experiencing it had been quite surprising at first, none the less. At the moment, she didn't have any control over the flame's power, either, so it, too, was pretty fierce in her rage. "Leviathan's begun converting my body so that I can help Nanaki's race survive!"

Her father just stood there for several minutes, staring at Yuffie's pendulating tail. Then, slowly, he sank to his knees. "What…what would your mother say…?"

"She'd probably be glad that I fell for a guy who's not as wimpy as you are," Yuffie said lightly. "She always said you were her biggest mistake."

To Yuffie's surprise, her father did not react to the insult. He just shook his head slowly. "What are the people of Wutai supposed to do now?" he asked.

"Huh?"

"You can't inherit my position if you're not human…"

"Why not!?" Yuffie countered. "I'm better than just human now! I'm gonna live way longer!" Although she still wasn't a hundred percent certain that was the case, but…well, Shelke claimed that the indications were there that Yuffie's lifespan was indeed expanding. Yuffie wasn't entirely sure that Shelke really had the qualifications to analyze the situation, but since there wasn't even anyone else to ask…

Yuffie's father sighed sadly. "I shall have to speak to the people about this," he said sadly. "I dislike the entire situation, but it is obviously beyond my ability to influence events. I will tell them what you told me, and we will see what they think." He rose to his feet, then shot Yuffie a very dirty look. "But don't think for a minute that I believe you about this being Leviathan's will!" he added, before storming out of the room past her.

"Yuffie…?" Nanaki asked uneasily. "Is it going to be okay?"

Yuffie shrugged. "I didn't expect _him_ to believe me anyway. But if the people do…that should be enough. I think. I dunno. C'mon, let's go back to my place. I'm starting to feel a little dizzy."

Nanaki chuckled. "Hopefully, that will go away once your tail is fully grown."

"Yeah, hopefully," Yuffie agreed, as she put her moogle hood back on. No point in letting the people of Wutai see her tail before her father's announcement. They might come to erroneous conclusions….

As quickly as they could, they left her father's large house, and hurried across town to Yuffie's small flat. Some of the cats from the house down the stairs had gotten inside, somehow, but Yuffie didn't really care. Tossing off her hood and cloak, she curled up in a ball on her futon, enjoying the still-strange sensation of her tail curling up around her body and beginning a slow, idle twitching.

Nanaki walked up and laid down beside her, curling up as well, though he extended one paw to place it on her arm. "What will we do if the people of Wutai don't accept us?" he asked.

Yuffie sighed. "I guess if that happens…we'll have to go back to Cosmo Canyon after all. But I want to be able to be here to protect my people. Even if they won't let me lead them anymore…"

After all, Wutai had been her whole life! She had only ever started stealing materia in order to win the war, and then in order to try and restore Wutai's former glory. She had only decided to accompany Cloud in the fight against Sephiroth for Wutai's sake. She had only joined the fight against the Sephiroth-remnants—what little of the fight she was permitted to be involved in, anyway—to get back the children who had been stolen from Wutai. And she had only allowed Reeve to talk her into helping Vincent fight those Deep Ground guys because of the attack on Wutai.

What would Yuffie even have left if the people of Wutai didn't want her anymore?

The sound of her lover's deep, purr-like snores answered that question as soon as Yuffie thought it. Even if Wutai didn't have any room for her any longer, at least she would have Nanaki and their love. And eventually, she would have his babies, too…

But she still wanted to have her place in Wutai! She had dedicated her whole life to her people, and if they threw her out because of her one selfish decision…it would feel like her whole life had been wasted!

…although, as she drifted off the sleep, Yuffie mused over the fact that _certain_ of her acquaintances would probably claim she had made a lot more selfish decisions than just this latest one…

Yuffie was woken from her nap at the sound of her door being sneakily opened and slowly closed again. At the sound of several tiny feet stealthily walking towards the screen that sheltered the futon from the doorway, she opened her eyes and lifted her head a bit. It was dark in her room, and the only light came from the gently pulsing flames on the two idly twitching tails.

"We seem to have guests," Nanaki whispered quietly, his yellow eye barely glinting with the reflection of the flame on Yuffie's tail.

"Don't worry about it," Yuffie assured him, though her voice was drowned out by a sudden squeal from behind her.

"It's true! It's true!" the little voice gushed, and within seconds Yuffie could feel six small hands grabbing her tail.

"Hands off, shrimps!" she growled, though she wasn't really angry. Those kids were the future of Wutai, after all. And who knows how they had suffered when those Sephiroth-remnants had kidnapped them….

The kids giggled and laughed, and kept playing with her tail, ignoring Yuffie's words. They kept at it until one of them suddenly shouted in pain. "Ow! You burned me!" the little boy yelped, jumping away from her. "You really are a monster!"

Yuffie sat up, looking at the little boy who was now sucking on his fingers and glaring at her. "What'd ya think was gonna happen if you stuck your fingers into a flame?" she asked, scratching at her head sleepily. Then something about his words struck her. "Hey, what'd you mean…when you said I was 'really' a monster…?"

"My poppa said you're a monster now!" the boy snarled as best he could around the fingers still in his mouth.

Yuffie grimaced. That kid…he was Shake's younger brother. And Shake's old man, he was even more obnoxious than his eldest son. "I'm not a monster," Yuffie told him, sighing sadly. "I'm just not human anymore."

"Then you're a monster!" the boy retorted.

"That is a very narrow world-view," Nanaki said, moving to sit beside Yuffie.

The children all jumped nervously, and stared at him with wide, uneasy eyes. "Is that…really…your…boyfriend…?" one of the two little girls asked Yuffie.

"Yeah, that's right," Yuffie assured her, with a warm smile. "Although fiancé is probably a more accurate—"

"What's wrong with 'mate'?" Nanaki asked, sounding wounded.

"Nanaki!" Yuffie yelped. "N-not in front of little kids!"

"What? Why? I don't understand…"

Yuffie felt her cheeks heat as all three little children stared at her curiously. "I…I'll explain later," she squeaked. Then she peered at the kids through the dark in the room. "Hey, so…what did people think about my dad's announcement?" she asked.

"My dad says you're a monster," the boy reminded her. "An' he wants you tried for treason for saying nasty things about Leviathan!"

"I didn't say anything nasty about Leviathan!" Yuffie snapped back at him. "And even if I did, that wouldn't be treason!" That wasn't something to joke about! Treason was a capital offense!

"Yuffie, maybe we should see what's going on," Nanaki suggested uneasily.

"Y-yeah…good idea," Yuffie agreed, and did her best to stand up, though it was still difficult, since she was still adjusting to having a tail. Once she was finally on her feet, though, she ran out into the front room and grabbed up her shuriken off the table, plucking Leviathan's materia out of its slot and putting it into one of the slots in her wrist guard before running out of the room. Just in case…

Fortunately, her momentum as she ran helped her to keep her balance, so Yuffie was able to reach the meeting in fairly short order. It was being held—as anything really important would be—in the open grounds in front of Leviathan's temple.

Yuffie's father stood on the small wooden stage in front of the temple, facing the crowd and looking helpless and annoyed as he listened to the speech being delivered by Shake's father, Bakufu. The speech was filled with furious rhetoric that made Yuffie's stomach churn with disgust and indignation. She was only able to stand and listen for about a minute before she began stomping through the crowd towards the front of the temple. As soon as he saw her approaching, Bakufu stopped pontificating, and let out a grim chuckle. "See, the blasphemer approaches!"

"I am _not_ a blasphemer!" Yuffie growled back as she came to a stop in front of him. "How could I undergo this transformation if it wasn't Leviathan's will?"

Bakufu laughed, and shook his head. "You must think me a fool," he spat at her. "You're chummy with all those WRO people, and they're all ex-Shinra! And we all know what kind of sick experiments the Shinra used to perform on people."

"They are not _all_ ex-Shinra!" Yuffie snapped. "Lots of them were in anti-Shinra groups!"

"Even the ones who _were_ in Shinra employ were never involved in those sort of experiments," Nanaki pointed out as he padded up beside Yuffie. "Except as victims," he added, more quietly.

Bakufu turned to look at the gathered people of Wutai, and pointed accusingly at Nanaki. "You see?!" he bellowed. "The beast speaks! Only the unnatural tampering of the vile Shinra could produce an animal capable of speaking like a human! That thing probably started out as a human being! Do you want to see Wutai in the hands—in the _paws_—of a creature like that one?!"

The crowd had already started murmuring uncertainly even before Yuffie lost her temper and punched Bakufu in the face. "You can say all the terrible things about me you want, but you don't get to talk nasty about my Nanaki! He's the holy guardian of Cosmo Canyon, as his family have been for centuries!" she screamed at him.

"I don't think 'holy' applies at all…" Nanaki said quietly, shaking his head.

"If he is guardian of Cosmo Canyon, then let him remain there," Bakufu snarled, rubbing his jaw where Yuffie had struck it. "He has no business in Wutai."

"I'm here, so he's here," Yuffie replied coldly. "And don't forget, I'm still the future leader of Wutai!"

"_That_ is what we are here to prevent," Bakufu laughed. "You have always been a spoiled child, tolerated because it was expected that you would marry a man capable of keeping you under control. But if you insist on perverting your body and your gene pool by marrying a monster, then—"

"I told you not to talk that way about Nanaki!" Yuffie bellowed, trying to hit him again, though she found herself restrained by her father before she could manage it.

"You're not helping by hitting him," he told her. "Calm down."

"Would you be calm if they had said stuff like that about Mom?" Yuffie demanded.

Her father sighed sadly. "You knew no one was going to accept this decision of yours so readily. Rising to his taunts is only going to make your situation worse."

Deep down, Yuffie knew that her father was right, but it was hard to see anything through the haze of rage that clouded her eyes, given the way that Bakufu had been insulting her beloved Nanaki. But he was now going off on another rant about how Yuffie was proving by her actions the unholy nature of her new self, so she was going to have to do something, _fast_, or she would lose what little support she was finding among the people.

"All right, let's just ask Leviathan, then, why don't we?" Yuffie interrupted, with a self-satisfied smile. "If this is his will, then he'll show up to support me, and that will be all the proof you could ever want that this is the right course of action." She lifted her hands above her head, carefully covering the materia with one hand, so that its glow as it activated wouldn't be quite so obvious. "Leviathan, great Water God, symbol of our divine right, if it is indeed your will that I follow the course of my heart, then show yourself to us now!" she cried out, looking heavenward as she activated the materia.

Naturally, Leviathan appeared in the air in front of her, swirling in a circle, no doubt confused as to why he had been summoned outside of combat. It would have been ideal if he had made some kind of gesture that seemed to support Yuffie's claim beyond simply appearing, but sadly all he did was hang there in the air a few moments, and then dive back up through the clouds. Still, the people were murmuring in awe, and some of them were even praying. Yuffie smiled as she lowered her hands, feeling certain that she had won over her people with that absurdly simple display that didn't really prove anything. After all, what kind of summon monster _didn't_ show up when called? She wasn't naïve enough to think that Leviathan was _really_ a god…

Unfortunately, Bakufu was not so easily fooled as the general populace. Snarling at her like a brute beast, he suddenly lunged towards Yuffie, and grabbed her wrist with one hand. His grip was not nearly strong enough that Yuffie couldn't have shaken it off it she had been ready, but she was taken so by surprise that he had yanked the Leviathan materia out of her wrist guard before she could react. "Anyone can use a materia to make that shade of the god appear!" he bellowed, raising the red orb above his head so that the audience could see it. "Don't be fooled by this blasphemer's words!"

"If it's so easy, _you _do it," Yuffie taunted back. She knew that Bakufu was only a politician; he had never trained a day in his life for combat. He wouldn't have enough magical energy to summon Leviathan. Apparently, neither her father nor her lover realized that, though, as they were both making some very worried noises.

However, Bakufu was staring down at the materia in his hand in panic now. Yuffie had a feeling that he didn't even know how to use one, even if he had the magical strength required. Well, either way, as long as he couldn't summon Leviathan, her point would work. Finally, Bakufu grimaced, and clenched his fist tightly around the materia. "Mighty Water God," he shouted, "appear before us and strike down this treasonous bitch who blasphemes your holy name!"

The audience held their breath for several minutes, but Leviathan did not appear. Yuffie chuckled as she took her materia back. "Just because I had a summon materia on me, you thought it was that which allowed me to call on Leviathan?" she laughed in the man's face. "This is a Bahamut materia," she added, hoping her lie would fool at least a few people in the audience. "Leviathan came himself because we are the chosen family, ruling this land by his divine will."

"Well handled," Nanaki whispered to her, as she resumed her place beside him, slotting the Leviathan materia back into her wrist guard. "I was worried for a few minutes there, but…"

"Hey, this guy's a moron," Yuffie assured him. "A total wimp."

"Moron and wimp are very different things…" her lover replied, sounding worried.

"Surely you can see now that this is something that does not offend Leviathan," Yuffie's father was saying to Bakufu, though he didn't sound very convincing about it. "Your concern for Wutai is touching, but—"

"How long must we endure the depredations of this selfish family?" Bakufu exclaimed, returning to his self-righteous fury as he turned back to look at the gathered people, even as he pointed at Yuffie's father. "They have done everything in their power to destroy this grand nation, until we are left with nothing but the tourist trade to depend on!"

The crowd roared their approval of Bakufu's words, but they made Yuffie rankle with fury. That was _her_ line! That was what _she_ had spent all these years fighting against! How dare he usurp it and turn it against her!?

"We must take back the former pride of Wutai, and to do that, we must rid ourselves of the burden of royalty!" Bakufu went on, apparently in high form. How long had he been planning this? That was the only thing Yuffie could think as she listened to a speech suddenly pouring forth form Bakufu's lips with such speed and polish that it was something that had clearly been practiced hundreds of times. How long had he been planning to rise up and replace her father as the ruler of Wutai? This speech had nothing to do with Leviathan, blasphemy, treason, or Yuffie's transformation, and what little it had to say about Yuffie described her as a child. He must have been planning to attempt a coup for _years_. From the sound of it, he might have started plotting before the war was even over…

Bakufu's speech was only halted when the other four from the Pagoda of the Five Gods slowly filed up on stage and took up positions to either side of Yuffie's father, with Chekhov standing to his right, and Shake to his left. Bakufu stared at his son in shock. "Shake…? What are you doing here? Have you come to help apprehend these rogues?" he asked hopefully, indicating Yuffie and her father.

But Shake shook his head, his acne-encrusted face just as stern as those of the others. "I'm sorry, Father," he said, his voice somewhat deeper than it had been when Yuffie had last heard it, a change she suspected was being intentionally forced, given that he had gotten his growth spurt so recently that his clothes were still too small for his now gangly frame. "I took an oath to stand by Lord Godo as one of the Five, and I must honor that oath above everything, even above my duties to my own father."

"Even the Five are betraying Wutai?" Bakufu asked, staring at them in disbelief.

They shook their heads as one. "Maintaining our loyalty to our liege is not betraying our nation," Gorky answered solemnly.

"It is our duty to obey Lord Godo, as he is the human representative of Leviathan's divine will," Staniv added.

"We would be betraying Wutai if we sided with your ambitions," Chekhov pointed out, a slightly cruel smile on her lips. "You are the traitor here." Yuffie had to withhold a scowl. Was that old bag senile? Call a guy like Bakufu names, and you just play into his hands!

From the sick grin on his face, Bakufu had been waiting eagerly for _someone_ to call him a traitor, and the fact that it wasn't Yuffie or her father didn't change his glee at the opening being handed to him. "Who speaks of treason?" he asked with a laugh. "I only speak of restoring Wutai to her original glory."

"You were fast enough to cry 'treason' when you were talking about my love life," Yuffie snarled back at him.

"If you are going to pass off your perversion as a divine duty, then you must expect reactions of shock and horror," Bakufu retorted all too calmly. The smug smile on his face worried Yuffie. He seemed altogether too prepared for this. Had he already known about her relationship with Nanaki before her father's announcement?

"It's not perversion!" Yuffie shouted back, feeling her tail go rigid in hate. "I don't love him because he's different from me—I love him because of who he is!"

Bakufu shook his head, spreading his hands helplessly. "Perhaps, perhaps not. You would hardly admit to simple perversion so easily, after all. Perhaps you even believe your own words…but I doubt that. You just won't admit the truth, even though we can all see it quite clearly. This stubborn refusal to come clean…I suppose you _do_ come by it naturally. After all, your father's stubbornness was what plunged this country into war and nearly destroyed us all."

"You take that back!" Yuffie yelled furiously. "It was the Shinra who started the war!"

But Bakufu only laughed. "Do you really believe that? Perhaps you were too young to know the truth. The Shinra approached us _peacefully_, seeking only to negotiate a land purchase so that they could build one of their Mako Reactors here. It was Godo's stubborn, violent refusals that precipitated the war."

Feeling something icy plunging into her chest, Yuffie looked at her father, hoping to hear a denial, to hear that the truth was anything but what Bakufu said…but he wouldn't meet her eyes. His words from three years ago suddenly sprang back into her mind: "I am the same now as I was before, when I wanted the war." How…how could _he_ have been the one who caused the war? More than half the population of Wutai was killed in the war, and whole towns were ravaged off the map, never to be seen again. And worst still, Yuffie's mother _died_ in that war!

Yuffie was still reeling with the feeling of betrayal at knowing that she had been blaming the wrong side for the war that had destroyed her childhood when she suddenly noticed something so strange that it broke her out of her spiraling throughts. For some reason, Chekhov had set her hand on Godo's arm in a way that almost looked…_tender_. While Yuffie was wondering if she should pipe up and ask what in the name of Leviathan and all his great oceans _that_ could possibly be about, she was snapped back to attention as Bakufu started talking again.

"My fellow Wutaians, surely it is as obvious to you as it is to me," he was saying. "Time and again, these two have proven that they are incapable of leading our nation into anything but the depths of destruction and depravity. We must purge ourselves of the curse known as the royal Kisaragi line!"

Yuffie was slightly gladdened by the fact that assembled people—at least two-thirds of Wutai's population—were reacting in a very uncertain way to Bakufu's declaration, but the brazen nature of the declaration was far too worrying to allow a lukewarm reaction among the population to give her any particular comfort. Gorky and Staniv tried to argue against Bakufu's extremist stance, but their gifts were for combat, not words, and they were losing the argument badly. Finally, one of the elders walked slowly up onto the stage where the others were assembled, and looked long into Bakufu's face, then into Yuffie's and her father's.

"This is not a question to be decided lightly," he said, in a slow, solemn voice, "but now that it has been so brazenly broached, it must be given a full and careful decision. We shall discuss this long, and—if Lord Godo agrees—hold a general election in one week's time, to decide the matter."

"I…have no choice but to agree," he replied sadly. It was a heart-breaking sound, hearing him so broken…or at least it would be, if it hadn't been for the horrifying news that _he_ had started the war that had robbed Yuffie of her mother.

"The deliberations will be best held without the presence of you or your daughter, Lord Godo," the elder continued. "If you would kindly retire from this place, that would facilitate our discussions."

Yuffie's father sighed deeply, and nodded with a weak gesture that reminded Yuffie all too much of the way he had been in the six years between the end of the war and Cloud's visit to Wutai. He had not taken more than a step towards the stairs off the stage before Chekhov suddenly took both his hands in hers, smiling into his face. Something about the way she was looking into her father's eyes made Yuffie's skin prickle angrily, and she could feel her tail whipping about behind her.

"I'll come by and tell you how it goes," Chekhov assured him quietly. "Don't worry, Lord Godo. The people know how much you love them and this land. How much you both do," she added, as if an afterthought, aiming a smile at Yuffie even as she let go of her father's hands.

Yuffie wanted to reply, but her father was already ushering her towards the stairs back down off the stage. The assembled populace stared at them as they left the temple grounds, and no one made even a sound until they were well on their way back up to Wutai proper. She didn't want to, but Yuffie agreed to her father's suggestion that she return to his house with him, and await Chekhov's news there.

After all, if the decision was too unfavorable, Yuffie and Nanaki might want to leave the country in a great hurry…

_[It's been a long delay since the last chapter, but it would have been even longer if Rythgar hadn't shared suggestions and opinions with me! Thanks again!]_


	7. Unsettling

It was very late when Chekhov finally came to see them, and her expression did not fill Yuffie with confidence. Without waiting to be invited, Chekhov sat down on the floor in front of them, and tried futilely to smile….but she didn't seem to be able to say anything.

"Don't leave us in suspense!" Yuffie's father insisted. "What happened at the meeting?!"

"Nothing's been decided for certain," Chekhov told him, shaking her head. "Everyone agreed with the elder's plan to hold an election next week on the matter."

"What sort of election?" Nanaki asked, tilting his head to the side curiously. "What are their choices?"

Chekhov shook her head sadly. "The choices are to create a new form of government, with Bakufu at its head—"

"There's a surprise," Yuffie muttered glumly. That creep was just taking advantage of the scandal her relationship was causing in order to enact a coup d'etat!

"The other choice is for you to remain as our ruler, Lord Godo," Chekhov continued, "but…even then…"

"Even then…what?" Yuffie's father prompted, when Chekhov didn't finish.

"Even then, you'll be expected to remarry," she said, with what struck Yuffie as an entirely false look of sadness. "No one wants Miss Yuffie to inherit now that she's…well…not quite what she used to be."

"Yeah, yeah, I'm not human anymore, you don't gotta pussyfoot around it. Just don't start callin' me a monster or an abomination or anything, okay?"

Nanaki suddenly chuckled. "You would be in good company even if you _were_ to be called those things. Vincent and Cloud routinely call themselves such names."

"I'm not sure that's really what I'd call _good_ company, personally," Yuffie said, shaking her head. Former Shinra stooges who only left the company after one of its employees turned on them violently? Okay, it could be _worse_, but…it could sure as heck be better, too!

"Remarry?" Yuffie's father repeated, sounding shell-shocked. "I…I've never…I've never even contemplated such a thing…"

"It wouldn't really be so bad, would it?" Chekhov asked, moving suddenly to sit beside him, and setting a comforting hand on his knee. Yuffie felt her tail start thrashing about violently. Could that old bag be any more _transparent_ in hitting on Yuffie's father?! What was _wrong_ with her?!

"I don't even know any eligible maidens," Yuffie's father continued, thankfully oblivious to the middle-aged woman currently putting the moves on him.

"You'd hardly need to find a 'maiden'," Chekhov said, with a light laugh. "Just an unmarried woman of any age. A war widow, for example," she added, apparently having realized that her prey had not yet picked up on her desires.

"It's not _that_ simple," Yuffie pointed out, trying her best to remain civil. She knew if she started getting all up in arms about it, her father might do it just to tick her off. He got weirdly stubborn whenever his daughter pointed out that she knew better than he did… "If you're really gonna remarry, then the idea's to make a new heir, right? So you can't marry some menopausal hag, you know?"

"M-menopausal!?" Chekhov repeated, sounding infuriated, then she suddenly let out a long laugh, covering her mouth with the back of her hand, as if that could make her look refined. "Maybe you're still just a child, if you don't know how very old a woman has to be before menopause becomes a concern."

Yuffie smiled grimly. "In my case, I'll have to be, what, eight hundred?" she asked, glancing over at Nanaki.

"Ah…I have no idea," he admitted helplessly, his ears drooping slightly. "That might be about right, though…"

Yuffie's father let out a deep sigh. "What did the people sound like they favored?" he asked Chekhov, looking at her with worry written all over his face. It made him look even older than he already was.

"I think they'll probably vote in your favor, Lord Godo," she assured him. "Most of the people present at the meeting seemed quite put off by Bakufu's incendiary rhetoric."

He nodded, then sighed again. "Still, I should probably be planning a campaign to woo them to my side," he concluded. "Bakufu will spend the entirety of the next week trying to convince everyone he can that I am a menace—no, that my whole bloodline is!"

Chekhov nodded eagerly. "It's a good idea, my lord! I'll be overjoyed to help!"

"I'm sure all of the Five will want to help," Yuffie hurried to point out. "Obviously, Nanaki and I will help, too. If you lose your post, we probably won't even be welcome in Wutai at all anymore." As much as she didn't want to lose her position as the future ruler of Wutai to an as-yet unborn half-sibling, better that than to lose it to Shake's crazed father. At least if her father stayed leading Wutai, then Yuffie could stay there as long as she wanted, being a guardian of the nation, and a supporter to her father, her half-sibling, and then to a long succession of nieces, nephews and…actually, maybe it would be best to leave Wutai after a few generations. It might get too depressing to stay any longer than that….

"You should run along and get your rest now," Chekhov suddenly told her. "I know how cranky little girls get when they don't have enough sleep."

"It's old ladies that need sleep, not strong, healthy young women," Yuffie pointed out furiously.

Chekhov laughed again, but Yuffie could see a throbbing vein on the side of her forehead despite the otherwise seemingly genuine laughter. "Lord Godo, let me help you plan your campaign," she suggested in an altogether too provocative tone, as soon as she was done laughing.

But Yuffie's father shook his head, thankfully. "It's late," he said, "and I will need to be well rested if I'm going to enter into a public competition of wits starting in the morning. Yuffie, you should get some rest as well. You will be beleaguered with questions tomorrow, and I expect you to answer them with dignity and grace, if you don't want to dishonor all our ancestors!"

"Yeah, don't worry about me," Yuffie said, getting to her feet and hoping she didn't look worried. "I'll be fine. You just take care of yourself, old coot," she added, in a teasing way.

Her father grumbled a response, but then turned his back on everyone, moving to take a place in front of the family altar, where he lit up a stick of incense in front of the picture of Yuffie's mother. It should have made her feel relieved that he was still devoted to her mother…but instead it only reminded her of what Bakufu had told her, that it was her father, not the Shinra, who had started the war that had robbed her of her mother…!

Consequently, she was absolutely livid the whole way home, and she changed out of her clothes in a manner more befitting combat than getting ready for bed, despite that what she was changing into was only a thin nightgown. She hadn't been lying down on her futon for more than thirty seconds before she felt Nanaki's nose nudging up her nightgown, and his tongue furtively starting to lick her private parts.

Yuffie pushed his head away, turning her body aside as she did so. "I'm not in the mood," she muttered.

"But…I thought you could use some cheering up," Nanaki said plaintively.

"I don't _want_ to be cheered up!" Yuffie snapped. "Didn't you hear Bakufu? My dad's the one who got my mom killed!"

For several minutes, there was only the sound of Yuffie's tail thrashing and burning to break the silence. "I don't understand," Nanaki finally said. "When did he say that…?"

"My mom died fighting in the war, like most of the population of Wutai," Yuffie explained. "So when my dad started the war…that means he's the one who got my mom killed."

"Oh. I see. I'm sorry," Nanaki said tenderly, then curled up beside her, resting his head against her shoulder. "I thought maybe you were upset because of the argument you were having with that woman…"

Yuffie grimaced. "Yeah, that, too," she agreed. "The nerve of her, goin' after my dad like that!"

"Going after him?" Nanaki repeated. "She…was trying to…she wants to be the one he marries?"

"You didn't think it was obvious?" Yuffie asked, incredulously. How could he have missed that?!

"I don't really know much about human mating practices," Nanaki reminded her. "Only what we've…ah...experienced together…"

Yuffie sighed sadly. It shouldn't have surprised her that her non-human lover didn't understand human women. In her experience, it was typical for human men not to understand a single thing about women, so why would Nanaki be any different? "Well, trust me, she was doin' everything other than use a megaphone. And if Cait Sith had been around, I'm sure she'd have swiped his megaphone to use it, too," she added, with a chuckle. "That stupid old bag…"

"Is she that old?" Nanaki asked curiously. "She didn't seem to be as old as your father…"

"Yeah, Chekhov's probably only about forty," Yuffie surmised, after a moment's thought. "So in a way I guess she's actually too young for him, but…ugh. I just don't think I can stand the thought of it! She's not even a proper Wutaian!"

"Huh? But…isn't she one of the people you fought in that pagoda three years ago?" Nanaki asked, sounding confused.

"Yeah, it's just…" Yuffie sighed, and shook her head. "Back when the Shinra were first starting up, like about a hundred years ago or something, one of the little countries they swallowed whole didn't wanna get swallowed up, right? So a bunch of its people fled here an' there an' everywhere, but mostly _here_. You can always tell them from proper Wutaians 'cause they've got different-sounding names. Chekhov, Gorky, Staniv, they're all descendents of those refugees who came here to get away from the Shinra. They're not really Wutaian."

"That sounds a bit racist, Yuffie," Nanaki reprimanded her.

"Th-that isn't what I meant! It's not that I think they're worse people or anything! It's just…one of them marryin' my dad…so that one of their kids will rule here…? It just seems so _wrong_!"

"Given what you're expecting the people to accept in our relationship, I don't think you have any right to object to that," Nanaki told her firmly.

Yuffie scowled. Was she _really_ in the wrong here? Was it actually a terrible thing for her to be judging them as unworthy of ruling in Wutai because of their blood? Well…maybe…but maybe not…after all, what if there really _was_ something to the belief that Leviathan favored their people? If that was true, then he probably wouldn't like them anymore if the royal bloodline got diluted with foreign blood. Then again, if Leviathan was just an ordinary summon after all, then that would be meaningless…

She continued turning the issue over and over in her mind until she finally drifted off into an uneasy sleep, filled mostly with Chekhov's annoying laugh, and horrifying images of her going further and further in attempts to seduce Yuffie's father, sometimes with the ghost of Yuffie's mother weeping in the background. That actually made it better, though; Yuffie's mother hadn't been the type to weep over anything, so it made the nightmares less convincing. Still, she did not wake feeling very rested, and she was still in a bad mood as she started getting dressed again.

"How are we going to handle this?" Nanaki asked tentatively, as they ate their breakfast, breaking the silence that had lingered in the room all morning. "I don't know much about political campaigns. Should we ask Reeve for help?"

"Not on that, no," Yuffie said, shaking her head. "I'll let my dad handle the politicking. It's the only thing he's good at anyway. I'm just gonna try an' put up the right kind of answers if anyone asks me any questions. That and there's a couple of things I want to do first."

Nanaki tilted his head to one side curiously, but didn't pry. He was probably still feeling a little stung that Yuffie hadn't let him make love to her last night. She did feel a little guilty about that—after all, it was the first time she had ever really refused him—but she didn't think she'd be able to make it up to him until after the elections were over. If anyone happened to see or hear them making love…it might sway them over to Bakufu's side.

After breakfast, they left Yuffie's place, and headed towards the outskirts of town, where Wutai's only television station was located, in an area blocked off from sight by an enormous line of trees. The television station had a plain, drab building that would have looked more appropriate in Midgar than in Wutai, which was why no one liked to come near it, or even see it. "I had no idea this was even here," Nanaki commented as they approached the building.

"That's the whole idea," Yuffie told him, pointing to the trees. "But right now, we need their help."

"We do?"

Yuffie didn't bother explaining, since she'd have to explain again once they got inside anyway. The lobby of the station was bustling and noisy, but as soon as the doors shut behind the young lovers, everything fell silent. Yuffie grimaced, and pretended not to notice the way everyone was staring at her. Instead, she plastered a fake smile on her face, and turned to the receptionist. "I'd like to talk to the head of programming, please," she told her.

"Wha—?! Oh! Um….let me check his schedule…" the receptionist stammered, then began frantically flipping through an appointment calendar. How typical that they hadn't gone digital with their schedules yet! Yet another case of Wutai clinging too tightly to the wrong customs. "Erm…he seems to be free right now…I'll…I'll just call up and—"

"Nah, don't bother. I'll announce myself," Yuffie told her, then headed for the elevator.

Nanaki ran after her, but he looked at her with worry as soon as the elevator doors closed behind them. "Yuffie, is it all right? We didn't really get permission…"

"Yeah, don't worry about it. I know him."

"Of course you do; Wutai is a small town…"

"That's not what I meant," Yuffie snapped irritably. She did _not_ like being reminded that Wutai was now only a 'small town,' not considering that it had been a large and prosperous nation when she was born. "He's actually my cousin, but his father was a bastard, so everyone pretends not to know that he's part of the family."

"They ignore someone just because his parents weren't married?" Nanaki asked, sounding worried. "But…my species…we don't even have marriage. I know my parents didn't have anything like that…"

"As long as no one around here knows that, who cares? Besides, it's not usually a big deal. It's just that you can't have someone inheriting the whole country who was the product of an extramarital affair," Yuffie explained, shaking her head. "Though, actually, I don't really see what the big deal is, but…I'm not the wife who got cheated on, so maybe that's why?"

"You'll never find out what that's like, I promise!" Nanaki exclaimed, his yellow eye gleaming passionately. "You're the only one I'll ever mate with!"

"Oh, Nanaki, you're so sweet!" Yuffie exclaimed, giving her lover a brief kiss. It would have been a longer one, except that the elevator had finally arrived at its destination—from its slow speed, it seemed to pre-date the war—so they were forced to resume a less intimate pose quite quickly.

"The front desk told us you were coming," the secretary said, staring at Yuffie and Nanaki with wide eyes. "He…he said you can go on in…"

"Of course he did!" Yuffie laughed, and headed through the big double doors into the main office, where Kei awaited her. Although his official title was 'head of programming,' he was more like the owner of the television station…though technically _he_ wasn't the one who actually owned it…

"Yuffie, sweetie! It's been so long!" Kei exclaimed, giving her a warm hug.

"Let go of her!" Nanaki growled angrily.

Yuffie laughed as she extricated herself from her cousin's arms, and then she crouched down in front of her lover. "It's okay, Nanaki. I told you, he's my cousin, remember?"

"I've heard lots of stories of human males having incestuous desires for their cousins," Nanaki replied, his one eye still glaring at Yuri.

"Don't worry yourself so much," Kei said, smiling broadly. "I'd never cheat on my boyfriend."

"Boyfriend?" Nanaki repeated, his glare being replaced by a look of confusion. "But you're a male."

Kei just laughed.

"Some men are like that, Nanaki," Yuffie told him, ruffling his mane a little. "Just don't tell anyone, okay? It's supposed to be a secret." Not that Kei's behavior was likely to fool anyone into thinking he was straight, but…as a relation to the royal family, he didn't have the freedom to come out of the closet, either. Now that she was having to suffer through the way some of the people were reacting to her love affair with Nanaki, Yuffie could suddenly relate to everything Kei had been through.

"I'm always glad to see you, dear, but there's really nothing I can do," Kei told her, as Yuffie stood up and turned to look at him again. "If I try to run anything political in Lord Godo's favor, you know Bakufu will remind everyone about my father's standing as a royal bastard. And…sometimes people say that my father died fleeing the battle instead of fighting to the end. I don't want to risk that being said again."

"Yeah, an' I doubt Bakufu's fooled about your relationship with your 'employer,' either," Yuffie agreed, nodding. "I just need two things from you, that's all. And I doubt Bakufu's gonna be able to react to either of them."

"Oh? Well, if it's in my power, you know I'll help out!" Kei assured her.

"There've been years and years and years of historical dramas about our ancestors," Yuffie reminded him, "so I want you to run as many of them as you can in the next week. Without being _too_ obvious, of course, but still, as many as you think you can run without Bakufu noticing. I doubt he's gonna be spending much time watchin' TV anyway," she added.

"That's no problem," Kei agreed, nodding, "and they're always popular, so it should be good for our ratings, but you do know that the foreign channels have a much larger audience here than we do, right?"

"Yeah, that's the other thing I want from you," Yuffie told him, with a self-satisfied grin. "I want copies of all the ones that are gonna be most easily appreciated by foreigners, an' I'm gonna get the foreign channels to run 'em. And _that_ is something Bakufu can't do a damn thing about!" she crowed delightedly.

"That's true," Kei agreed, "but won't Bakufu counter that you and your father don't live up to our famous ancestors?"

"Hey, I helped save the whole _world_!" Yuffie pointed out. "_Twice_! How many of my ancestors can say _that_?!"

Kei shrugged. "None, I suppose, but…well, I guess all we can do is try it and see what happens, hmm?" He walked around behind his desk and sat down, taking out a book and beginning to flip through its pages. "I think you and Lord Godo should be prepared to face that attack, though," he added.

"Hey, I'm _totally_ ready," Yuffie said, shaking her head. "I've done way cooler, more impressive things than my ancestors ever did. Dad's gonna look like a loser, but…there's not really any way around that, since he is one."

"Yuffie, that's a terrible thing to say about your own father!" Nanaki exclaimed. "It isn't his fault he couldn't win the war, surely."

"Yeah, it is!" Yuffie countered angrily. "All he hadda do was cheat a little! Those Shinra creeps were—" She stopped abruptly, sighing and shaking her head. "No, I shouldn't talk about stuff like that. If any of Bakufu's supporters heard me…"

"Anyway, can't he turn into some kind of god?" Nanaki added. "Wouldn't that impress people?"

"Well, yeah, but…I think he can only turn into Omni under certain circumstances," Yuffie answered, sighing. "Otherwise, why wouldn't he have done it during the war and scared off all the Shinra right off the bat?"

"Oh, yes, that's a good point," Nanaki agreed. "I'm sure that would have terrified the average human greatly." He laughed sadly. "If I recall correctly, a few of our number were rather frightened, for that matter."

"I'd think all of 'em except Vincent were," Yuffie said, laughing.

"If Cloud was frightened, he didn't admit it," Nanaki assured her, "but even Tifa seemed a little worried by the idea that you might be able to do that, too."

"I don't _think_ I can," Yuffie said, looking down at her hands curiously. She had sometimes wondered what it felt like to have four of them…but then she felt her tail twitching, and sighed sadly. "Even if I could have, I bet I can't now," she concluded, perhaps a little glumly.

"All right, I think I've picked out the shows that will play best to a foreign audience," Kei suddenly announced, looking up from the book he had been consulting. "Where do you want me to deliver the canisters?"

"Canisters? They're not digital?" Nanaki asked, surprised.

Yuffie wasn't surprised, though. She knew Wutai was still using film. "Let me find out," she said, taking out her cell phone and quickly calling Reeve's number.

"Ah, Yuffie, I thought you might call," Reeve said as soon as he picked up. "But I don't think there's anything I can do to help you. The WRO can't interfere with internal political—"

"Don't worry, I'm not asking you to," Yuffie interrupted. She was actually a little surprised he already knew about what was going on, but she didn't want to waste time saying so. "I just wanted the foreign TV stations to run some old Wutaian historical dramas. Oh, they're called dramas, but they're more like action shows!" she quickly assured him. "Period pieces about my great ancestors kickin' butts and takin' names, mostly. I thought you'd be the person to talk to about getting that to happen."

"Oh, I see," Reeve said after a moment, and Yuffie had a feeling he was nodding. "Yes, I can help you there. I have connections at all the major television stations. Will the people who own the shows trust you to e-mail the episodes to the station managers?"

"Uh…we still use film stock here," Yuffie explained, feeling a little embarrassed. "Besides, some of these shows are older than I am!"

"Ah. That complicates matters a little, then…but I think we can still work something out. I'll send a courier to fetch them, then."

"Okay. Try an' keep it low profile, okay? Like, don't land an airship right in the middle of town," Yuffie pleaded. "I don't want to call any more attention to myself than I already have done."

"Don't worry," Reeve assured her. "It'll probably be a few hours, maybe more. Is that all right?"

"Yeah, it's fine," Yuffie said, then hung up the phone, and looked back at Kei. "Okay, so just collect the cans and have 'em ready for whenever the courier gets here."

Kei nodded. "I'll have the stock boys start pulling them right away," he assured her, with an unnerving smile that made Yuffie worry that the poor stock boys weren't allowed to wear much in the way of clothing. But she _really_ didn't want to think of her kind cousin as having anything in common with Dio and his ilk, so she did her best to shove that idea right out of her brain and pretend it had never existed.

Yuffie and Nanaki quickly said their farewells to Kei, who began a lengthy phone conversation with his stock department even as they left the office. Given all the numbers he was rattling off, keeping track of film canisters was apparently a very tricky business. No wonder everyone else had gone digital! It was much easier to keep track of stuff that was stored on a computer.

The young lovers returned to the main part of town, where they were quickly beleagered by a posse of middle-aged women, most of whom had children trailing after them. The women seemed quite irate at Yuffie, but the children quickly began to make even more noise than their mothers, as they started playing with Yuffie's tail, and climbing all over poor Nanaki. It was a miserable experience that lasted at least an hour—though it felt like much longer—but Yuffie managed to keep her composure, and she was pretty sure she hadn't said anything that would upset her father's chances in the upcoming election.

In fact, considering that she managed to sway a couple of the mothers to see things from her point of view, Yuffie felt that she had actually done really well.

Still, after that ordeal, she wanted to have a little peace and quiet, so she and Nanaki headed over towards the Da Chao, and took a seat in a shady area near the base, where they sat and talked for some time, until Yuffie noticed a spot not far away where the stone seemed a bit darker than the surrounding rock. Looking around, she realized that that spot was directly beneath the flat hand…meaning that dark spot might have been the blood stain where Corneo had splattered all over the path.

Suddenly, Yuffie felt sick to her stomach, and decided that they needed to head back into town, much to Nanaki's confusion. They were headed back towards Yuffie's place when they were surprised to hear a voice calling Yuffie's name.

"Cloud? What are you doing here?" Yuffie asked, turning to look at him in confusion. He was still wearing that ugly black outfit, complete with the arm cape, even though he no longer had any geostigma to cover up.

"Reeve hired me to come get those TV shows from you," Cloud explained, sounding a little perplexed. "You'd totally forgotten I run a delivery business now, hadn't you?" he added, sounding annoyed and a little exasperated.

"Gawd, is that his idea of low profile?!" Yuffie exclaimed, deeply annoyed. What could be low profile about anything involving _Cloud_?!

Cloud sighed. "Yuffie…when someone does you a favor, you shouldn't complain about it."

"I'm not complaining, but…enh, never mind! C'mon, they're at the TV station," Yuffie told him, starting to lead the way. "I don't know how you're gonna carry 'em all, though."

"Don't worry, I can manage," Cloud assured her.

They hadn't gotten halfway across the town square before they were ambushed by a number of Wutaian citizens, all clamoring for Cloud's attention. Yuffie tried to growl a warning at him that he'd better not say anything stupid, but she wasn't sure she could make him understand without everyone thinking she was threatening him.

"You're not here to threaten Lord Bakufu, are you?!" one of them demanded of Cloud.

"Lord who?" Cloud repeated, his confusion sounding genuine. Surely he'd been told _why_ she wanted those TV shows run on the foreign stations, hadn't he? Somehow, Yuffie had to admit that it wouldn't really be that surprising if he hadn't been. "I'm just here on delivery business. Picking up a package for the WRO."

"Why is a great hero running errands?" one of the women asked, gazing at Cloud so dreamily that Yuffie wanted to find an excuse to mention Cloud's long-standing relationship with Tifa…

"I'm not…really…a hero," Cloud said sadly, shaking his head. "And I run a delivery company. Reasonable rates!" he added, somewhat pathetically. Considering he only answered his phone like one time in twenty, his rates were definitely not the reason his business was floundering.

"Well, Mr. Not-Really-A-Hero, tell us the truth," Bakufu's supporter started in, with a sickening smile on his face, "what do you really think of Miss Yuffie here?"

Cloud scratched his head for a moment, then shrugged. "I think she looked better without the tail," he answered.

Yuffie kicked him in the shins. "That's not what they want to hear, you dumbass!" she shouted. She regretted it immediately, of course, but…what else was she going to say?!

"What?! What?! Are you still angry about what happened at the party?" Cloud asked, looking as though he genuinely didn't understand.

"What do you think of her _personality_ and _abilities_?" Bakufu's supporter clarified, ignoring the argument. "She's rather a nuisance, isn't she?"

"Well, she _can_ be annoying," Cloud admitted, "but she's a very skilled fighter. In some ways, she's more skilled than any of the rest of us were."

"In _some_ ways?" the other man repeated. "You mean, in her ability to steal from her own companions, perhaps?"

Yuffie's fists clenched up, and her tail started thrashing so wildly that most of the other citizens backed away, looking frightened. But Cloud lifted up a hand in front of her, keeping her from retorting.

"If you don't think stealing materia from someone _while_ they're fighting _without them noticing_ is impressive, then there's something wrong with you," Cloud answered, shaking his head. "It was just a childish prank, but the skill involved was amazing. And it's not like she ever tried it again or anything," he added, making Yuffie feel just a little bit awful, considering she had, in fact, stolen about half the party's materia after the battle with Sephiroth was over, though no one had seemed to notice.

"I'm surprised you dismiss it so readily, considering your life was put in danger by it," Bakufu's supporter continued in an oily voice, making Yuffie wonder just who had been telling Bakufu what.

"The only people in danger were Yuffie and Elena," Cloud said, shaking his head. "It was annoying, but that's all. And it saved Wutai from the threat of Corneo, right? That was probably her reason for the whole thing," he added, in the most ludicrous claim Yuffie had ever heard. How did he think that would have even worked? She had had no idea Corneo even existed until his goons had grabbed her…

Bakufu's stooge didn't look convinced, but the rest of the people did, and started murmuring approvingly. "Surely you're not saying that you think your fight three years ago was actually aided by Miss Yuffie's involvement," he said in a very flat voice.

"Of course it was! We needed all the help we could get!" Cloud replied, almost angrily. "I mean, yeah, we probably still would have won without her," he then admitted, making Yuffie scowl, "but it would have been harder. And I don't think the world would have been saved from Omega Weapon if that had been the case."

"Wh-what?" Yuffie asked, feeling her cheeks heat up. Why would anyone think that? She had barely done anything in that fight.

"Well, Vincent said you saved his life in Nibelheim," Cloud told her, shrugging. "And if he'd died, then nothing could have stopped Omega Weapon, right? So you were indispensable in _that_ fight."

Yuffie nodded, but she was too embarrassed to speak. After all her awkwardness and bad disposition towards Vincent since he had walked in on them having sex, he had still said something that nice about her? She really hadn't been expecting that…

"Do you really believe her claim to divine intervention on behalf of her perversions?" Bakufu's supporter asked, apparently having given up on trying to get Cloud to complain about Yuffie directly.

"What's perverted about falling in love with a friend?" Cloud asked back, sounding like he genuinely didn't understand the question. Did he really not get it, or was he better at acting than Yuffie had given him credit for?

"That thing isn't even human!" one of the other assembled citizens yelped, setting both Nanaki's and Yuffie's tails thrashing angrily.

"Nanaki is one of my greatest friends," Cloud replied coldly, "so I'll thank you not to call him a 'thing'."

"What concerns Lord Bakufu is the fact that this selfish she-beast has taken our great Water God's name in vain in her attempts to rationalize her behavior," the smarmy supporter oozed. However, as he was talking, Yuffie suddenly realized that she didn't know him. She'd never laid eyes on him before. How could there be anyone in Wutai that she didn't know? Wutai had been reduced to only a few thousand people since the war ended, and Yuffie knew all of them by sight, if not by name. And yet she'd never seen this guy before… "Surely you can appreciate why that upsets us."

"Well, it's Yuffie's god, too, right?" Cloud asked. "She wouldn't have said something about it if it wasn't true, would she?"

Bakufu's supporter scowled. "How do _you_ think she grew that tail, then? You don't believe in Leviathan, so you can't think that Leviathan wants her to help this creature reproduce. So where do _you_ think it came from?"

Cloud frowned. "I don't think it's any of my business," he finally answered, after a long pause. "It's there, ruining her cute little butt—"

"Hey!" Yuffie yelped, kicking him again.

"Keep your eyes off her!" Nanaki growled, glaring at Cloud.

"I wasn't—I didn't even look! I was just saying!" Cloud objected. "You have to admit that you looked better before!"

"I don't think so, no!" Yuffie retorted. Although, actually, in a way she knew she had looked better before, since at least her clothes had fit more properly back then.

"I think she looks _better_ now," Nanaki added firmly.

"This is all very amusing," Bakufu's supporter said, "but it doesn't address the real issue. If that tail is the indication of a plague that continued contact with this furry being has caused, then we need to drive them out of Wutai before it spreads to anyone else."

"If that was the case, the people of Cosmo Canyon would all have tails by now," Cloud laughed.

"Only if they allowed the beast to mate with them," the other man replied smugly.

"Even if that _were_ the case, it would only matter if one of us was cheating on the other," Yuffie pointed out. "But _I_ have a question for _you_!" she added, poking the man in his chest. "Who the hell _are_ you?! You're not a Wutai citizen."

"I am!" he objected weakly. "I've lived here all my life!"

"Oh, really? Anyone here ever seen him before?" Yuffie asked, looking at the other people clustered around them.

The people looked at each other helplessly, then one woman bit her lip a bit before speaking. "I saw him yesterday at Bakufu's place," she offered uneasily.

"Yeah, but before that?" Yuffie prompted, making the woman shake her head. "See? You're not really from around here. So who the hell are you?"

"He looks Wutaian, though," Cloud said, looking at the slightly panicky Bakufu supporter. "He's got those Wutaian eyes, you know? Like yours."

Yuffie sighed. "That doesn't necessarily mean anything. It's not like people never left here to settle elsewhere. It didn't happen often, but it did happen."

"You can't get out of this by attacking me!" the Bakufu supporter retorted weakly. "I have nothing to hide! You're just trying to get the spotlight off your own indefensible actions!"

"If you've got nothing to hide, then you have no reason not to explain why no one knows you, despite how small Wutai has become," Nanaki pointed out calmly.

Bakufu's supporter just shook his head repeatedly, backing away from them. "I'm not the one on trial here!" he squeaked.

"I didn't think _anyone_ was on trial," Cloud said, his brow furrowing in confusion. "Is something more going on than Reeve told me about?"

"How should I know?" Yuffie retorted. "I don't know what he told you! But no one's on trial for anything," she assured him, though she realized that it was bending the truth a little, since the election was very close to a trial for herself and especially her father.

"Well, he said there was some kind of flap about you and Nanaki, and now someone wanted to usurp your father's position or something," Cloud said, scratching his head a little. "Honestly, I was still asleep when he called. Tifa's been experimenting with some new cocktails, so…I'm still a bit hung over…" Yuffie had to repress a scowl. Who admitted to being hung over while they were in the middle of an argument like this one? "Reeve didn't sound like he thought there was any danger of of Lord Godo losing, though," he added.

"You won't get away with this!" the mysterious man snarled, somewhat out of the blue, since everyone had been ignoring him for nearly a minute. Then he ran off at speeds that were fairly impressive, given his age and fairly out-of-shape appearance.

"I didn't know people still used lines _that_ clichéd," Cloud laughed. "So he's not really from Wutai, then."

"Duh! If he was, I'd have recognized him!" Yuffie pointed out. "But I was hoping to find out who he was and where he came from, and why he's so worked up about Bakufu winning…"

"We should investigate," Nanaki agreed, nodding. "There might be something more going on than we thought."

"Yeah," Yuffie agreed. "Better tell my dad, too. Or maybe we shouldn't worry him until we have more information," she amended her own statement. "He's probably got enough on his mind already." She sighed, then turned to Cloud. "C'mon, let's get going so you can make your delivery as soon as possible."

Cloud nodded. "Works for me. It's too loud around here; it's hurting my head."

Grimacing, Yuffie led Cloud in the direction of the television studio, trying to ignore the way the other Wutaian citizens were now gossiping very loudly. Mostly, they just seemed to be appalled by Cloud's hangover, and his brazenness in admitting to it. However, that might mean they were going to place less stock in his opinion of Yuffie, so it was still a bit worrisome…


End file.
